Vergangene Veranstaltungen

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here:

https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5wqde-hrT4qGNGgbMI21ciNylEyLdUgkpRj

 

 

Invitation to an Online Lecture – OII Lectures in Iranian History and Culture

Iranian Music in Ottoman Sources:
Questions of Authenticity, Fidelity, and Cultural Transfer

 

Arastoo Mihandoust

University of Tehran, School of Performing Arts and Music

 

Wednesday, 22 March 2023, 19:00 (Turkish time; GMT +3)
The seminar investigates the early history of the migration of musicians and repertoires between Timurid Iran and the early Ottoman Empire on the basis of song-text collections (maǧmūʿas) and teḏkires (biographical dictionaries). In the Safavid-Ottoman song-text collections from the late 17th and early 18th century onwards, a certain group of compositions attributed to the Timurid masters of the 15th and 16th centuries can be regularly identified, together with a distinct awareness for the distant and different nature of this repertoire. The presentation aims to show that some of these compositions indeed stem from vocal compositions that in older sources are attributed to various composers such as Ṣafī ad-Dīn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, ʿAlī Sitāʾī, Khwājah, Amīr Ġaḍanfar, Şams-I Rūmī, Hajjī Dadah, Ġulām Şādī, ʿAlī ʿAwwād, Ḥaydar Tūnī, and Şāh Pīlahdūz, thus indicating that actually old songs were still sung in the Safavid and Ottoman courts long after the names of most of these composers were forgotten, when they were misattributed to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Marāġī and al-Fārābī. This study suggests that the capture of several Iranian musicians by Sultan Murād IV contributed to the survival of these works in the Ottoman repertoire. In conclusion, it seems that some of the compositions that were sung in different cities of Iran during the late Timurid and early Safavid periods, were transferred to the Ottoman courts and underwent some changes over time.

Arastoo Mihandoust is a pianist, ud player, composer, and ethnomusicologist whose research is currently focused on the Safavid-Ottoman Musical repertoire and how the two traditions stemmed from common origins. In addition to a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Tabriz University (2013) he holds a M.A. in ethnomusicology from Tehran University (2021). His research aims to put the current Iranian traditional music practice in historical context.

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here:

https://eu02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_l3NEJMwbQPaTy_fh38F-QA

American Sign Language (ASL) Interpretation will be provided.

 

Invitation to an Online Lecture

How to make a difference: Free 3D printed devices for earthquake victims

Zeynep Karagöz

Robotel Türkiye

 

Monday, 20 March 2023, 19:30 (Istanbul; GMT +3) / 17:30 (Berlin, GMT +1) / 11:30 a.m. (New York, EST)

This lecture offers an opportunity to learn more about our work at Robotel Türkiye, which I am heading, in providing free 3D-printed prostheses for children who lack access to such devices. I will focus the impact it has had on the lives of those we serve. Our primary focus has been on providing mechanical hands, arms, and fingers to children, although we have also served adults upon request. However, recent events have led us to extend our services to include shoulder mechanisms, adult models, and orthotic prosthesis devices.

On 6 February 2023, at 04:17 TRT (01:17 UTC), a M7.8 earthquake struck southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. In this lecture, I will focus on our efforts in the earthquake region in Turkey, where we have received numerous requests for our services. I will discuss the impact of our work in the region and the urgent need for volunteers and financial support to continue our efforts. Our organization is currently facing a significant increase in demand, and we cannot continue our vital work without additional resources.

I will discuss the challenges and successes of our work, and the ways in which interested individuals can get involved and make a difference. With your support, we can continue to serve those in need and make a positive impact on their lives.

Therefore, I would like to call for financial support from individuals, organizations, and institutions who share our vision of improving the lives of those who lack access to prosthetic devices. Donate by following this link: https://fonzip.com/robotel/online. Your contributions will go a long way in helping us provide free prostheses to those who need them the most. Together, we can make a difference and ensure that everyone has access to the medical care they deserve.

 

Zeynep Karagöz (Robotel Türkiye) graduated from MSÜ – Architecture and co-founded KOMA Architecture in 2001. With Robotel Türkiye, she started making 3D printed mechanical hands for children with hand deformation who do not have access to prosthetics. In 2017, Robotel became an NGO. Karagöz iş currently the head of Robot El Association and she designs collaborative multidimensional &multidisciplinary projects. She also shares her expertise as a speaker, trainer & mentor. Defining herself as a PROMAKER she is addicted to civil society & social entrepreneurship.

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here:

https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYsdOutrTIiGNBQpHLBsAh11479MW3whZ8m

 

 

Invitation to an Online Lecture

The Iconography of Early Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Single Sheet Paintings

 

Suzanne Compagnon MA MA

(University of Vienna)

 

Wednesday, 15 March 2023, 19:00 (Turkish time; GMT +3)

 

 

The talk presents some results of the author’s on-going PhD project on clothed figures and representation in Ottoman book painting with a focus on the single sheets attributed to the Ottoman artists ʿAbdülcelīl Çelebī Levnī (d. 1732) and ʿAbdüllah Buhārī (active between 1726 and 1745). These images depict figures in elaborate attire, generally alone against a generic background. The artworks have mainly survived as part of late eighteenth-century Ottoman albums. Their subject matter has only received cursory attention resulting in a rather superficial understanding of the iconography. The author’s PhD thesis offers a systematic analysis of this iconography, summarised in the present talk. The figures’ attire allows us to identify various stock characters. These evoke urban elite culture and, in some cases, connections to urban literary culture can be reconstructed. The paintings in the Levnī style clearly reinvest pictorial motifs popularised by Ottoman single sheet paintings in the seventeenth century. Their centrality as an iconographic source is well illustrated by the few depictions of Ottoman officials. These draw on seventeenth-century types developed outside of court workshops rather than on those of illustrated court histories. The paintings in the Levnī style are employed as a source for those in the Buhārī style, but the latter also reveal a direct engagement with seventeenth-century single sheets. The artists also represent novel subject matters. The talk explores these processes of iconographic renewal, foregrounding the creative agency reflected by the artworks.

 

Suzanne Compagnon is a PhD student at the University of Vienna, currently a visiting scholar at Sabancı University and the Orient-Institut Istanbul on a Marietta Blau scholarship. She specializes in early modern arts of the book with a focus on the Ottoman Empire. Her research interests also include textile and dress history as well as aesthetics and sensory history. Previously, she received her M.A. from the University of Vienna in Art History and her undergraduate M.A. from the University of Edinburgh in Arabic and History of Art.

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here: https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Yuduypqj8rG9UKhY929Lhg0MqBr0tKmio0

 

 

Invitation to an online Book Launch

Voices That Matter – Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey, Marlene Schäfers

Dr. Marlene Schäfers
assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University

in conversation with

Dr. Argun Çakır
anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, University of Bristol

and

Dr. habil. Martin Greve
Ethnomusicologist, Orient-Institut Istanbul

Wednesday, 1 February 2023, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT +3)

 

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

 

Marlene Schäfers is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, the politics of death and the afterlife, and the intersections of affect and politics. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2015. Before coming to Utrecht, she held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at Ghent University (2016-2019), an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same institution (2019-2020), and a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2020-2021).

 

Düzenleyenler / Organizers: Melike Şahinol, Emine Öncüler Yayalar,  Şafak Kılıçtepe, Arsev Umur Aydınoğlu, Erkan Saka

Destekleyen / Supporter: Orient-Institut Istanbul

Yer / Venue: Orient-Institut Istanbul, Susam Sokak 16 D.7, Beyoğlu / Istanbul

*Dersler Türkçe olarak yapılacaktır. / The lectures will be held in Turkish.

 

STS TURKEY Bilim ve Teknoloji Çalışmaları (STS) Araştırma Ağı, ülkemizde Bilim ve Teknoloji Çalışmaları alanında araştırma ve eğitim faaliyetlerini teşvik ederek alanın görünürlüğünü ve yaygınlığını artırmak amacıyla çalışmalarına devam etmektedir. STS TURKEY Kış Okulu, STS alanının temel teorik çerçevelerini, önemli kavramlarını ve ilgili tartışmalarını alana giriş düzeyinde aktarmak gayesiyle, ilki 2019 Ocak ayında Orient-Institut İstanbul’un desteğiyle İstanbul’da,  sonrakiler sırasıyla Bilkent Üniversitesi, ODTÜ Tasarım Fabrikası ve İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi, Yeni Medya ve İletişim Bölümü desteği ile düzenlenmiştir.

 

Başvuru alımı 18 Ocak 2023‘te sonlanacaktır. Ders programı, eğitmen listesi ve başvuru formuna buradan ulaşablirsiniz.

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here:https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Yuduypqj8rG9UKhY929Lhg0MqBr0tKmio0

 

ÇEVRİMİÇİ SUNUMA DAVET

 

 

Dr. phil. Nejla Melike Atalay

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

DFG-Projekt Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO)

Institut für Musikwissenschaft

 

Besteci Kadınların Türkiye Cumhuriyeti önce ve sonrasında Yaratım Koşulları. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’ne müzik tarihinde üç besteci üzerine bir vaka çalışması: Leyla [Saz] Hanımefendi (1850?-1936), Nazife Aral-Güran (1921-1993) ve Yüksel Koptagel (d. 1931)’in üretim ve yaratım koşulları

 

Çarşamba, 11 Ocak 2023

19:00 (Türkiye saati; GMT +3)

 

Bu sunum Tanzimat’dan 1980’lere kadar uzanan süreçte farklı dönemlerde yaşamış ve üretmiş üç İstanbullu besteci Leyla [Saz] Hanımefendi (1850?-1936), Nazife Aral-Güran (1921-1993) ve Yüksel Koptagel (d. 1931)’i konu alacaktır. Bestecilerin üretim ve yaratım koşulları, içinde bulundukları sosyo-politik ve kültürel ortam; aile ve eğitim geçmişleri, yaşadıkları ve ürettikleri sosyal alanlar perspektifinden incelenecektir.

 

Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun Tanzimat döneminde başlayan ve günümüz Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’ne sirayet eden dönüşüm sürecinin bir parçası olarak ‘Batı müziği’nin ve eğitiminin kurumsallaşması, ele alınan bestecilerin ‘Batı müziği’ ile kurdukları bağların, çoksesli müzik ile ilişkilerinin, aldıkları eğitimin sonucu olarak gelişen müzikal kişiliklerinin anlaşılmasında önemli bir yer tutmaktadır. Sunumda, Türkiye’de çoksesli müzik alanında temsil edilen ve/veya üretimleri bu genre içerisinde görülen bu üç örnek besteci üzerinden Türkiye müzik tarihi yazımındaki besteci kadınların temsillerine de değinilecektir.

 

 

Dr. Nejla Melike Atalay İstanbul Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Devlet Konservatuvarı’nda müzikoloji öğrenimini tamamladıktan sonra Viyana Prayner Konservatuvarı’nda bestecilik eğitimi almış ve bilahare müzikoloji eğitimine devam ettiği Viyana Müzik ve Sahne Sanatları Üniversitesi’nde (Mdw) doktora çalışmasını tamamlamıştır. 2009’dan itibaren yurt içi ve dışında toplumsal cinsiyet ve müzik, kadın çalışmaları çerçevesinde organizatör ve koordinatör sıfatıyla bir çok projede yer almış ve etkinlikler düzenlemiştir. Atalay’ın 2019 yılında Herta Kurt Blaukopf Bilim ödülüne layık görülen doktora çalışması [Women Composers’ Creative Conditions Before and During the Turkish Republic. A Case Study on Three Women Composers: Leyla [Saz] Hanımefendi (1850?-1936), Nazife Aral-Güran (1921-1993) and Yüksel Koptagel (b. 1931)] 2021 yılında Viyana’da Hollitzer Yayınevi’nde basılmıştır. Atalay, 2021’den beri çalışmalarına Westfälische Wilhelms- Münster Üniversitesine bağlı ve Orient-Institut Istanbul tarafından desteklenen Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae Projesi’nde devam etmektedir.

 

To attend this online lecture, please register here

 

 

Prof. Dr. Christiane Gruber
(University of Michigan)

Hima in the House: Avian Architecture across the Islamic World

Wednesday, 7 December 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT +3)

 

Through its recent ecological turn, the scholarly study of “Islamic” architecture has expanded to take into greater account both the animal and vegetal worlds. As nature’s most accomplished architects, birds have long contributed to the biomorphic landscape and built environment of the greater Middle East. Stretching from Morocco to Turkey and India, houses made for birds, and made by birds, attest to the thriving of avian architecture across the centuries. Bird houses, whether impromptu or purpose-built, provide a type of sanctuary and refuge — or hima as conceptualized within Islamic philosophical and ecological traditions — dedicated to protecting avifauna and their related regions, the latter used as agricultural lands for human sustenance and/or as biodiversity reserves for non-human survival. Fluttering from nest and nook to tower and palace, this talk examines various types of bird houses along with their architectonic language and creative forms, their intersections with vulnerable places and peoples, and their bio-material contributions to an integrated creaturely world.

 

Christiane Gruber is Professor of Islamic Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan as well as Founding Director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her scholarly work (available here) explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art, especially figural representation, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, manuscripts and book arts, archaeology, architecture, and modern visual and material cultures. Her most recent publications include: The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images; The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World; and, with Michelle al-Ferzly, City in the Desert, Revisited: Oleg Grabar at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi. She is currently on sabbatical in Turkey, undertaking field research and writing her next book entitled Elements of the Middle East: Art, Faith, and Ecology).

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 28 November 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Prof. Dr. Edhem Eldem
(Boğaziçi University)

The place of Islamic artefacts in Osman Hamdi Bey’s artistic and museological career

Wednesday, 30 November 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT + 3)

Abstract

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), celebrated both for his talent as a painter and his achievements at the head of the Imperial Museum, has always had an ambiguous relationship to Islamic monuments, objects, and artefacts. On the one hand, they represented a gradual addition to the collections of the Imperial Museum, which eventually developed into a separate museum of Islamic art. On the other, they formed an integral part of his art, considering that he specialized, especially after the 1880s, in the depiction of Oriental(ist) scenes, consisting of one or a few figures in Eastern garb, located in, or before, a partially visible Ottoman monument, and surrounded by objects and artefacts of generally the same origin. Additionally, he also toyed with the idea of using these objects as a means of reviving local crafts, much in line with the arts and crafts movement initiated by the South Kensington Museum and emulated by practically every European state.

The three dimensions of Hamdi Bey’s engagement with Islamic arts and objects were not mutually exclusive. The use he made of these artefacts in the construction of imaginary scenes in his paintings was a constant until his death, and a close look at his works reveals numerous and significant repetitions and continuities. His treatment of the same objects as part of the museum’s collections was much less consistent. His initial plan of a revival of crafts never really took off, and soon left its place to the setting up of a collection that remained marginal compared to the institution’s focus on more ‘noble’ categories of antiquities. It was only towards the end of his life that this collection received much greater attention, mostly thanks to his brother Halil Edhem’s interest for Islamic heritage, in conformity with the rise of Turco-Islamic nationalism among the political and intellectual elites of the time.

Bio

Edhem ELDEM is a professor at the Department of History of Boğaziçi University and holds the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History at the Collège de France. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, EHESS, EPHE, ENS, and was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His fields of interest include the Levant trade, funerary epigraphy, Istanbul, the Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology and museology in the Ottoman lands, Ottoman first-person narratives, Ottoman photography, Westernization, Orientalism, and Osman Hamdi Bey. Selected publications: French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (1999); A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999); The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (1999, with D. Goffman and B. Masters); Pride and Privilege. A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (2004); Consuming the Orient (2007); Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (2011, with Zainab Bahrani and Zeynep Çelik); Camera Ottomana. Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire (2015, with Zeynep Çelik); L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident (2018); L’Alhambra. À la croisée des histoires (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2021).

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 21 November 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Dr. Roxana Coman
(Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Orient-Institut Istanbul)

Antiquities and Rarities in mid-19th Century Wallachia:
Dimitrie Papazoglu’s Collection for “The Feeling of Love of the Progress of my Nation”

Wednesday, 23 November 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT + 3)

In 1860, Dimitrie Papazoglu (1811 – 1892) opened a museum in his private residence on Calea Văcărești, no 151, Bucharest. During four decades, he had gathered a collection of “antiquities and rarities”, as he called it, that now formed the core of this private museum. Lieutenant Major Dimitrie Papazoglu had a significant military career; his family roots were either attributed to the Phanariot merchant family Papazoglu or to that of old Wallachian boyar Slătineanu. He received his formal education in the Habsburg imperial school in Brașov. After retiring from the army in 1857, he began dabbling in archaeology and history writing, and published a significant number of books, lithographs, and maps, often with a didactic purpose.

When Papazoglu describes the object-categories of his curatorial discourse he leaves the reader of one of his best-selling publications with the feeling of dealing with some form of Cabinets de curiosités or Wunderkammer. However, there is an evident didactic tendency in both his diverse publications, and his selection of artefacts. His insistence on and the various distinctions he makes between categories of “Turkish”, “Oriental”, and “Egyptian” provoke questions on their meaning in the context of the collection, the entangled histories of mid-19th century Ottoman Empire, and on the process of constructing a Romanian national heritage inventory. Dimitrie Papazoglu’s collection is not only a self-narrative of himself and his nationalist discourse, but also integrated in Romania’s self-representation, since Alexandru Odobescu exhibited a part of his collection in Romania’s national pavilion at the Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie, in 1867. This talk will focus on Dimitrie Papazoglu’s collecting practices and attempt to answer questions such as: what are the meanings he assigned to the artefacts he collected? How did he define the concept of antiquities? What were the contents of his collection? What are the current available sources for (re-)tracing the collection?

 

Roxana Coman is currently a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul and member of the COST Action Europe through Textiles: Network for an integrated and interdisciplinary Humanities. Her research interests include Ottoman material culture and private 19th and early 20th century collections in Romania. After graduating from a B.A. and M.A. in Art History at the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest, she explored in her Ph.D. the various narratives and representations on what was constructed as Oriental vs Romanian during the second half of the 19th century. Volunteering during her B.A. and M.A. studies in the National Museum of Art of Romania, she worked between 2016 – 2022 as a curator in the Bucharest Municipality
Museum.

After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2016, Roxana continued to research the dynamic between the presence of Ottoman material culture in Wallachia and Moldavia, and the strategies employed by the national state of Romania in dealing with its Ottoman legacy. Therefore, she attended several summer schools such as “Shadows of the Empires. Imperial Legacies and Mythologies in Central Eastern Europe,” 2021 in Sofia, Bulgaria, and “The City as Archive. Histories of Collecting and Archiving in and the Musealisation of Florence, Eighteenth Century to the Present,” 2018.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 14 November 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Dr. Theodor E. Ulieriu-Rostás
(Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Ethnological Archive)

Recovering the Provisional. Musealization and Photography in the Early Years of the Museum of Ethnography and National Art in Bucharest (1906 – 1912)

Wednesday, 16 November 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT + 3)

The 1900 Exposition Universelle and the 1906 Bucharest Jubilee Exhibition brought renewed interest in defining Romanian national specificity in visual and applied arts for wider audiences at home and abroad. In this context, German-trained art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș was appointed director of the newly established Museum of Ethnography and National Art in Bucharest (1906). Central to Tzigara-Samurcaș’ museal practice were his frequent acquisition trips in rural areas and his interventionist stance, which informed the relocation of large, freestanding structures to the museum – including an entire peasant house rebuilt indoors by its original maker. The museum and its collections were accommodated on the premises of the former State Mint, an ensemble shared with other public institutions on the northern outskirts of the city, while Tzigara-Samurcaș championed the project of a purposefully designed edifice in grand “national style” to be built on the same site, or preferably closer to downtown Bucharest. As such, the first ethnographic exhibition set up for about four years (April 1907 – spring of 1912) was caught in a peculiar state of fluidity: its existence was needed as a proof of validity for the museum as a large-scale project, but its setup at the old Mint was intended to remain provisional. Moreover, the incipient state of the collections left taxonomies, aesthetics and the underlying cultural narrative of the exhibition in constant negotiation, with displays reworked and artefacts permutated in the pace of new entries to the museum’s inventory.

Judging by his published work, it would seem that Tzigara-Samurcaș was not interested in memorializing his early museal experiments. While his militant articles from the 1900s included several views of the provisional exhibition, none was reproduced in his Romanian Museography (1936). The surviving photographic fonds of the museum comprise nonetheless several series of glass-plate negatives documenting the exhibition rooms, as well as details and individual artefacts put on display. TzigaraSamurcaș’ own production as an amateur photographer includes early film negatives taken on his acquisition trips and in the early setup of the museum. This presentation will draw the outlines of a comprehensive approach to this largely unstudied corpus. It aims to recover, as much as possible, the concreteness of these inaccessible spaces, to shed light on the intertwined microhistories of musealisation captured herein, and to reflect on the uses of photography in an early 20th century museum. 

 

Theodor E. Ulieriu-Rostás has studied history and archaeology at the University of Bucharest, the University of Montpellier and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Bucharest (2013) and was subsequently a research fellow at the New Europe College (2015 – 2016) and the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (2018 – 2019). He also received research scholarships from the French Government, the French School at Athens, and the Hardt Foundation for the Study of Classical Antiquity (Vandoeuvres). Theodor E. Ulieriu-Rostás currently holds the position of assistant researcher at the Ethnological Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Bucharest), where his research centres on 19th and early 20th century photography in Central and Southeast Europe.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 7 November 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

M. Merve Uca
(Sadberk Hanım Müzesi)

Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam:
Sadberk Koç as a Rigorous Collector

Wednesday, 9 November 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT + 3)

Turkey’s first private museum is named after Sadberk Koç, who pioneered in the development of private museums in this country. She is not only a key figure in the history of Turkish museums, but also in systematic antiques collecting. Sadberk Hanım was born in Ankara in 1908, the second of three daughters of Seraktar Sadullah Bey, who belonged to an eminent local family. She attended the Sainte-Euphémie French Junior School for Girls in Istanbul and at the age of 18 married her maternal cousin Vehbi Koç. Sadberk Hanım was a woman strongly attached to traditional values and family life and a supportive and understanding wife and caring mother, who ensured that her children grew up in a happy, peaceful environment that embraced the principles of the young Turkish Republic. At the same time, she was a dedicated collector with a keen aesthetic eye, who endeavoured to preserve Turkey’s cultural heritage. The collection that she gathered so meticulously now forms the nucleus of the Sadberk Hanım Museum collection, Turkey’s first private museum, which was founded with her encouragement and in her name. This collection, consisting particularly of textiles, embroideries and artifacts of other Ottoman arts that are now falling into oblivion, has in this way become available to the general public and academics, so opening the way for fresh ideas. Although Sadberk Hanım’s name is referenced in diverse publications on Turkey’s museums, her visionary personality, her role as a systematic collector, her contribution to preserving our cultural heritage and to the development of private museums in Turkey have not been sufficiently recognised. This lecture seeks to fill this gap by examing the development of Sadberk Hanım’s collection, the reflection of her personal characteristics on this development and the importance of her visionary approach in the context of antiques collection, private museums, preserving our cultural heritage and other areas. The lecture begins with an introduction about Sadberk Hanım’s life and goes onto to discuss her interest in art, her early collecting, the expansion of her collection, the past, present and future of Sadberk Hanım Museum, and the importance of its collection, especially in the field of textiles.

 

M. Merve Uca graduated in Archaeology from Bilkent University and completed a minor degree in Ottoman History at the same university. This led her into the study Sadberk Koç photographed at the end of the 1920s, Sadberk Hanım Müzesi archiveOrient-Institut Istanbul Lecture Series 7 of Ottoman cultural history. She went on to take a master’s degree in Art History at Koç University; writing a thesis entitled “A Fashion Bonanza: Representation of Ottoman Woman in the Sixteenth-Century Costume Albums”, under her supervisor Prof. Dr. Günsel Renda. She worked as a research assistant at Koç University from 2016 until 2019, when she was appointed as an art history expert at Sadberk Hanım Museum. She is currently serving as curatorial team coordinator, responsible for coordinating content development and relocation projects for the museum, which is in the process of relocating to a new site in the Golden Horn area. While working in fields such as museum design, developing concepts and scenarios for museums, and relations between objects and their contexts, she is simultaneously pursuing her academic studies on subjects including early Ottoman period textiles and costume, Ottoman cultural history and Ottoman-European relations.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 24 October 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Dr Ambra D’Antone
(The Warburg Institute, London)

“Karagöz is ours”: İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu’s Cultural Revivalism and the Long Turkish Modernity

Wednesday, 26 October 2022, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT + 3)

 

In 1939, the Turkish scholar and art critic İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978) spearheaded within the pages of his magazine Yeni Adam (New Man) a campaign of recovery of shadow theatre plays. Known informally as Karagöz plays, these candlelit performances of flat figurines mounted on sticks had been a widespread cultural phenomenon during the Ottoman Empire, but their relevance in the newly built, progress-facing Turkish Republic had been under questioning by the Turkish intelligentsia. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s programme of modernisation of Turkey, in fact, gestured towards the ideological severance of the Republic from its very recent Ottoman past. For Baltacıoğlu, who belonged to an oppositional faction of more “conservative” minded intellectuals, the inherent modernity of the Turkish nation could only be located in select, surviving forms of its collective memory and traditions – of which Karagöz was a powerful example – upon which Baltacıoğlu bestowed a creative impetus capable of revealing an authentic, self-sufficient and modern Turkish identity.

This lecture will discuss Baltacıoğlu’s recuperation of Karagöz in the press as instances of a wider phenomenon of cultural revivalism, closely connected to local art historiographical practices that had been developed since the 1920s. These accounts, privileging notions of anachronism, historical duration and the survival of form, joined an anti-orientalist and anti-colonial tradition which paired a deliberate self-orientalising vocabulary to avant-garde terminology adapted from European artistic quarters. Baltacioglu’s cultural intervention, whose conservative modernist attitude was politically motivated by his nationalistic beliefs, articulated the shadow theatre plays and its puppets as mobile carriers of the region’s artistic memory, positioning Turkish art history on an alternative trajectory of influence, memory and progress.

Dr Ambra D’Antone is a historian of global modern art and art historiography, with a particular interest for Early Republican Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. She is currently working as Research Associate of the Max Weber Stiftung’s Bilderfahrzeuge International Research Group and is based at The Warburg Institute in London, working on a book provisionally titled Methods of Turkish Art History: Writing Modern Art in Istanbul, 1926-1960. Dr. D’Antone is currently a Gerald D. Feldman postdoctoral research fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul.

 

 

Download the program leaflet here.

 

The conference will take place online via Zoom. In order to attend, register with your name, e-mail, and affiliation.

 

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 3 October 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

The story of the rise of modern Arabic literature begins in the 19^th century when the encounter with Europe instigates a far-reaching process of translation, adaptation, and transmutation against the backdrop of a wider move towards state-modernization on the one hand and incipient colonization on the other. In the throes of these sweeping changes, modern Arabic literature is born as a hybrid; its early examples in the 19^th century are a mixture of traditional Arabic literary forms and modern European ones.

Turning to debates on “khayal” (the imaginary, or as we go on to discover: the spectral) in the 19^th century, this talk re-tells the story of the inception of literary modernity in Arabic, in the late Ottoman period as an arduous reckoning with modern political sovereignty.

Dr. Maha AbdelMegeed is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut. Her current research focuses on rethinking the narratives of the origins of literary modernity in Arabic as well as on the changing conceptions of Arabic language from mid 18^thcentury till the early decades of the 20^thcentury. Dr. AbdelMegeed is currently a visiting scholar at the Orient-Institut Istanbul.

please click here for the program

 

Ort / Yer: Orient-Institut İstanbul, Susam Sok. 16 D. 8, Cihangir – İstanbul

Datum / Tarih: 01.07.2022

Zeit / Saat: 9:30 – 14.00

 

Zum Programm

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 24 June 2022 (Friday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Polish Republic was founded in 1918 and was able to defend its independence against Bolsheviks in the following years. The Peace Treaty of Riga (1921) was, however, rather a cease-fire and the Soviet Union conducted multilevel pressure on Poland trying to import revolution and to back ethnic separatism. Warsaw’s answer was the strategy of Prometheanism, covert financial and moral support for non-Russian exile elites of the former Tsardom scattered in Paris, Contanta, Istanbul and other cities. Numerous representatives of Crimean and Kazan Tatars, North Caucasians, Azeris, Turkestanis and Ukrainians found refuge in the early 1920s in Istanbul.

Poland supported and (co-)financed several edition and publication projects of those political emigrants and heavily contributed to the emergence of Turkish anti-Communist thought.

 

PD Dr. Zaur Gasimov read International Relations in Baku, Berlin and Eichstätt. Between 2002 and 2003, he worked as a press officer and translator at the German Embassy in Baku. After six years at the Orient Institute in Istanbul, he became Principal Investigator of DFG at the East European History Department at the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2020. His fields of interest are the cultural history of the Caucasus, the entanglements between Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the 20th century, the Soviet and Russian foreign policy towards Turkey and Iran.

 

 

Filmvorführungen

Hommage an den Anthropolgen Jean Rouch

in Frankreich, Amerika, Iran und Italien

Institut Français d’Istanbul (İstiklal Cad. No:4 Beyoğlu)

11. Juni 2022, 16:00 – 20:00
12. Juni 2022, 16:00 – 21:00

Diese Veranstaltung ist kostenfrei und ohne Anmeldung.

Im Rahmen seines Iran-Forschungsschwerpunkts ist das Orient-Institut Istanbul am 11. und 12. Juni 2022 Mitveranstalter einer zweitägigen filmischen Hommage an den berühmten französischen Anthropologen und Filmemacher Jean Rouch. In dieser gemeinsam mit dem französischen Forschungsinstitut IFEA sowie den in Istanbul ansässigen Kulturinstituten Frankreichs und Italiens veranstaltete Retrospektive der anthropologischen Studien Jean Rouchs zu verschiedenen Erdteilen kommt u. a. der preisgekrönte Dokumentarfilm der iranischen Filmemacherin Mina Rad mit dem Titel »Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran« zur Aufführung.

 

---

 

Persian Tales Jean Rouch in Iran a film by Mina Rad, 52′, 2019, WCD production, published by Montparnasse publisher

Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran is about the discovery of the deep relation of Jean Rouch with Iranian filmmakers. Jean Rouch, a French filmmaker and ethnologist, traveled three times to Iran in the 1970s . He gave several workshop and made a film in Isfahan. The iranian cinema today still have been directly and indirectly influenced not only by Jean Rouch’s method, but also through his vision and his sociological work. Persian Tales show how the young generation of iranian filmmakers, like Jean Rouch think about how camera can change reality!

In 2017, French TV5 Monde broadcast  “Jean Rouch Persian look”, on the occasion of the centenary of Jean Rouch , which is about Jean Rouch and the transe tradition in Iran. It is based on Iranian and French archive. It is the first film of Mina Rad about Jean Rouch

Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran has been made with the archive of Jean Rouch Fondation in France . It is also published by Montparnasse publishers in France in Dvd box dedicated to Jean Rouch..

 

• 2022 : « Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran », translated to Turkish and presented at Orient Institut in Istanbul at Crossroad in Iran and at French Institut in Istanbul)
• 2018 : « Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran »was presented at Melgaço International Documentary Film Festival in Portugal. It is published by Montparnasse publishers in France in Dvd box dedicated to Jean Rouch .

 

 

THE ENIGMA OF JEAN ROUCH IN TURIN CHRONICLE OF A « FILM RATÉ » , a film by Marco di Castri, Paolo Favaro, Daniele Pianciola , 90’, Les Films du Jeudi
Les Films de la Pléiade, published by Montparnasse publisher

Jean Rouch: ethnographer and filmmaker, one of the outstanding personalities of post-war international cinema, inventor of direct cinema, and, according to Jean-Luc Godard, the true animator of the Nouvelle Vague. In the middle of his career in the mid 80’s, after dozens of films shot between Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, he leaves the river Niger and the Dogon people just to land on the banks of the Po in Turin, following the footsteps of a pale fox that had appeared in a dream to a Swiss painter. What did he come for? In an industrial city of the working class North of Italy which had nothing at all to do with Africa? What had brought him to join with us three, then just three enthusiastic young film- makers, what led him to embark on a fleeing submarine bound for Egypt?

The film we shot with him in 1986 was called Enigma, and this enigma we have sought to unveil here with our words as witnesses, protagonists with Jean Rouch in an adventure that led us to share joyfully our imaginations. The film is based on over 40 hours of backstage filmed between 1984 and 1986, and is the most complete documentation of the peculiar ways of approaching and thinking cinema making by the great French author.

 

The debate will be presented by :

Christian Schnell, Directeur délégué à l’Institut français d’Istanbul

Ghislain Vidal-Giraud, Attaché de coopération audiovisuelle à l’Institut français d’Istanbul

Marco di Castri, Paolo Favaro, Daniele Pianciola, filmmaker

Mina Rad, filmmaker and producer World Cultural Diversity

Dr. Katja Rieck, Senior Research Fellow and Head of Research Focus Iran, from Orient-Institut Istanbul

Hervé Rony, Directeur Général de la Scam

 

Katja Rieck studied political science and economics (BA) at Princeton

University (USA). She continued her academic training by pursuing an MA in

sociocultural anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at Goethe University

Frankfurt/Main (Germany). In 2017 she completed her PhD in sociocultural

anthropology. Currently, she is senior fellow and head of the new research

focus on Iran at Orient-Institut Istanbul. She was also project lead for the

standing working group “Iran and Beyond: Breaking the Ground for Sustainable

Scholarly Collaboration” (IRSSC), a project that was conducted at Orient-Institut

Istanbul. In November 2021 and January 2022 the IRSSC organized the film

forum Iran at the Crossways: Documentaries and Dialogs on a Changing Society

at which the film Jean Rouch en Iran was first presented. It was out of the

discussions at these two film forums that the idea for the Hommage à Jean

Rouch was born.

 

MINA RAD born and educated in Iran, is now French documentary filmmaker, producer, festivals director and member of jury, critic of cinema and organizer of international conferences and seminars.

She has been directing the „International documentary Film Festival Apresvaran, on the step of Jean Rouch“ in Paris and has created a global documentary networking amongst the filmmakers who follow the method of Jean Rouch. She is in charge of public relations of Jean Rouch Foundation and has created a global seminar on Pierre Perrault.

Her first film “For Me the Sun Never Sets” was awarded the prize for best documentary at the Cinema Verite Film Festival in Tehran in 2012 with a jury mention, « for the warmth and simplicity to narrate a deep story ». The films that she directs and produces through World Cultural Diversity production are related to archives and the transmission of knowledge of French and Canadian anthropologist-filmmaker and the Amerinidiens in Amazon in north west of Brazil. They are telecast widely and shown at festivals as well as anthropology conferences across the world. Mina Rad is a cinema critic and writes about various film festivals in different media and in apresvaran.org. In 1990s she has got the award as the best female reporter for her work on Central Asia.

 

She has directed the cultural festival in the Indian Ocean financed by the European Commission in Mauritius, and has also worked as an international consultant for Iranian national school of cinema in Iran.

Mina Rad’s film making and all other initiatives are about the preservation and restitution of cultural heritage. It is to her a way of looking at the universe, following the path of cultural identity in the world.

 

This Event is free of charge and without registration. The movies are shown in its own language and some of them with Turkish subtitles.

 

Experience of a City: Multisensorial Approaches to Past and Present

Monday, 30 May 2022, 10:30–17:30 UTC +3 (Istanbul Time)

Orient-Institut Istanbul Online Workshop Series

 

Please click here for the workshop page.

 

Registration Information

The workshop will take place online via Zoom. To attend this online workshop, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the beginning of the workshop.

WICHTIGE ANMERKUNG: Diese Veranstaltung wird online per ZOOM organisiert. Für Ihre Registrierung senden Sie bitte bis zum 20. Mai (Freitag), bis 12:00 Uhr eine Email mit Ihrem Namen an events@oiist.net.

Wir informieren Sie danach über die Zugangsdaten.

 

Festvortrag von Prof. Dr. em. Peter Zieme (Berlin):

Barbara Kellner-Heinkele – ein Leben für die Turkologie

 

Der namhafte Iranist und Turkologe Prof. Dr. em. Peter Zieme, in Fachkreisen vor allem bekannt durch die fast 25-jährige Forschungstätigkeit im Rahmen des Akademievorhabens zur „Turfanforschung“ der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu den Textzeugnissen der alten Kulturen an der Seidenstrasse, hält anlässlich ihres runden Geburtstages die Laudatio zu Ehren von Frau Prof. Dr. em. Barbara Kellner-Heinkele.

 

Die einstige wissenschaftliche Referentin am Orient-Institut Beirut von 1979 bis 1982 hatte im Anschluß an den Forschungsaufenthalt im Libanon als Lehrstuhlinhaberin für Turkologie, zunächst an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main sowie ab 1990 an der Freien Universität Berlin, entscheidenden Einfluß auf den Fortbestand der Turkologie in Deutschland in ihrer klassisch breit angelegten philologisch-historischen Ausrichtung im Sinne einer Gesamtturkologie. Ihren Studierenden erschloß sich hierdurch die besondere Möglichkeit, sich mit  den Grundlagen und gegenwartsbezogenen Fragen türkischer Literatur, türkischem Theater, der osmanischen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte ebenso zu befassen, wie auch mit den Turksprachen des Wolgaraums oder Mittelasiens.

 

Seit ihrer bei Bertold Spuler 1968 abgefassten Dissertation Aus den Aufzeichnungen des Sa‘īd Giray Sultān. Eine zeitgenössische Quelle zur Geschichte des Chanats der Krim um Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts  galt ein persönlicher Interessensschwerpunkt dabei immer der von ihr viel bereisten Krim und den Krimtataren. Für die Wahrung ihres kulturellen Erbes hat sie sich stets mit besonderem Nachdruck eingesetzt.

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 4 April 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Invitation to an online lecture

 

Dr. Jana Matuszak

University of Tübingen

 

Parodying Songs of Praise: towards an understanding of Sumerian mock hymns

 

Wednesday, 6 April 2022, 19:00 (GMT +3)

 

 

Sumerian literature is recognized as the world’s oldest literature. It has only been recovered in the last century and this pioneering work continues today. While most major compositions such as epics and myths are available in modern translations, Sumerian mock hymns are hitherto completely unknown.

Taking as its starting point a nearly 4000 years old Sumerian literary text that has so far defied translation and interpretation, the paper will outline possible approaches to better understand a small group of texts whose genre is open to question. Previous scholarship – virtually non-existent as it is – has solely highlighted the texts’ derogative content, consisting of an abundance of verbal abuse directed at stereotypical incompetent and morally depraved characters. Allegedly devoid of literary sophistication, they have been dismissed as half-baked exercises in invective. By shifting the focus to their formal resemblance to hymns, I argue that these texts are not mere collections of random insults but can more aptly be described as parodies of hymns, or mock hymns. The longest and most complex of these compositions moreover contains intertextual allusions to practically all genres of Sumerian literature, ranging from proverbs to lamentations, from epics to love songs, and from lexical lists to prayers. The mock hymns hence reveal important new insights not only into the reception of traditional Sumerian literature from the 3^rd millennium BCE by Babylonian scribes in the early 2^nd millennium BCE, but also into the composition of humorous new texts in the intellectual milieux of Babylonia.

 

 

Dr. Jana Matuszak is Assistant Professor in Sumerology at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) at the University of Tübingen, Germany and co-editor of the bi-annually published academic journal Altorientalische Forschungen. Previously she worked as Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Jena and as Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at SOAS University of London. Her research focuses on the recovery of Sumerian literature, the intersection of gender, law and morality in Mesopotamia, as well as the intellectual history of Babylonia. Her award-winning PhD dissertation was published in 2021 by De Gruyter under the title “Und du, du bist eine Frau?!” Editio princeps und Analyse des sumerischen Streitgesprächs ‘Zwei Frauen B.’ With the support of a Gerald D. Feldman travel grant of the Max Weber Foundation Dr. Matuszak is currently conducting field-research in Istanbul as a visiting scholar at the Orient-Institut Istanbul.

 

Uluslararası çevrimiçi toplantı / Internationale Online-Tagung / International online conference

please click here for the program

 

WICHTIGE ANMERKUNG: Diese Veranstaltung wird online per ZOOM organisiert. Für Ihre Registrierung senden Sie bitte bis zum 14. Februar (Montag) eine Email mit Ihrem Namen an events@oiist.net.

Wir informieren Sie danach über die Zugangsdaten.

 

Die Zeit um 1900, also die Zeit der Herrschaft von Sultan Abdülhamid II. (reg. 1876-1909), war vom Bemühen geprägt, sich gegenüber den übermächtigen europäischen imperialen Staaten zu behaupten. Unter den Strategien einer positiven Selbstdarstellung boten sich fotografische Selbstdokumentationen des Osmanischen Reiches in besonderer Weise an. Das aus dieser Zeit erhaltene umfangreiche Bildmaterial verdankt sich zu großen Teilen privaten Ateliers wie Abdullah Frères und Sébah & Joaillier, aber auch staatlichen Zusammenstellungen von fotografischem Material, wie etwa die heute am British Museum und in der Library of Congress vorhandene «Abdülhamid Collection», aus der auch die Aufnahme aus dem Frauenkrankenhaus in Hasköy stammt. Solche Formen der Selbstdarstellungen hatten aber ihre Schattenseiten: Die Monotonie und Leblosigkeit der Abbildungen in diesen fotografischen Sammlungen sind erstaunlich. Zudem traten neben den erwünschten Formen der Selbstdarstellung die politische Unberechenbarkeit dieses neuen Mediums: Bedenken von Abdülhamid II. gegenüber der Fotografie waren berechtigt, da eine unkontrollierte Bildverbreitung politisch problematisch sein konnte. Der Vortrag wird nachzeichnen, welche Formen und Strategien der Selbstdarstellung dem Osmanischen Reich um die Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert zur Verfügung standen und dabei in besonderer Weise auf das Medium der Fotografie blicken.

 

Maurus Reinkowski ist seit 2010 Professor am Seminar für Nahoststudien, Departement Gesellschaftswissenschaften, an der Universität Basel. Er studierte an den Universitäten LMU München, Boğaziçi (Istanbul) und Wien. 1995 promovierte er an der Universität Bamberg über historiographische Deutungen des spätosmanischen Palästinas. Im Anschluss an einen Forschungsaufenthalt am Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (1995-1996) war er zwei Jahre wissenschaftlicher Referent am Orient-Institut Istanbul (1996-1998); anschließend Assistent an der Universität Bamberg und dort 2002 Habilitation über die osmanische Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert. Von 2004 bis 2010 war Maurus Reinkowski Professor für Islamwissenschaft an der Universität Freiburg im Breisgau und in den Jahren 2008-2010 Senior Fellow an der School of History, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies. Im Herbst 2015 war Maurus Reinkowski Gastprofessor an der Sabancı-Universität Istanbul. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen auf der neueren und neuesten Geschichte des Nahen Ostens und des östlichen Mittelmeerraums. Zu seinen jüngsten Publikationen zählen der gemeinsam mit Thomas Demmelhuber und Axel Paul veröffentlichte Sammelband «Arabellion – Vom Aufbruch zum Zerfall einer Region?» (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2017) und die Monographie «Geschichte der Türkei. Von Atatürk bis zur Gegenwart» (München: C.H. Beck-Verlag, 2021).

 

 

 

 

Bu Film Forum Orient-Institut Istanbul’un üç güncel araştırma alanı olan “Müzikoloji”, “İnsan, Tıp ve Toplum” ve “Din Çalışmaları”nın kısa film ve belgesel seçkilerini bir araya getiriyor.

Film Forum, Orient-Institut Istanbul araştırmacılarının film seçkisini ve farklı bakış açılarını diyalog zeminine oturtmak amacıyla yönetmenleri ve alanında uzman akademisyenleri bir araya getiriyor. Üç tematik oturum, izleyiciyi diyaloğa katkı sağlamaya davet ediyor.

 

20 – 22 Ocak 2022 tarihleri arasında „Iran at the Crossways“ forumunun ikincisi İstanbul’da gerçekleştirilecektir. Goethe Institut Istanbul iş birliği ile düzenlenecek Film forumu, 3 gün süreyle Institut Français  sinema salonuna konuk olacaktır. Etkinlik Türkçedir, filmler ve konuşmalar, altyazılar ve simultane ile Türkçeye çevrilecektir.

Katılım için kayıt olunması gerekmektedir. Aşağıdaki bağlantıdan bir veya daha fazla program bloğunu seçebilirsiniz.

Program bağlantısı Film forumu tüm katılımcılar için ücretsizdir. Giriş yapabilmek için kimlik belgesi ve geçerli bir HES kodu ibraz edilmelidir.

Perşembe, 20.01, 16:30-21:30: Belgesel Filmler & İran’da Toplumsal Değişim: „Farsça Hikâyeler, Jean Rouch İran’da“
Perşembe, 20.01, 16:30-21:30: Belgesel Filmler & İran’da Toplumsal Değişim: „Meslek: Belgeselci“
Cuma, 20.01, 16:00-18:30: Modified (Hu)Man
Cuma, 20.01, 19:00-21:30: Beden & Maneviyat
Cumartesi, 21.01, 12:00-15:00: İran’da Dinselliğin Görünümleri

Das Filmforum präsentiert Kurz- und Dokumentarfilme, die Einblicke in aktuelle Forschungsprojekte des Orient-Instituts Istanbul aus den Forschungsfeldern „Musikwissenschaft“, „Mensch, Medizin und Gesellschaft“ sowie „Religionsforschung“ geben.

Von der Konfrontation religiöser Gemeinschaften mit technologischem Fortschritt und der Moderne bis hin zu sich wandelnden Männlichkeitsvorstellungen im Kontext einer umstrittenen Geschlechterordnung, werden Einblicke in die iranische Gesellschaft gewährt, die international bisher wenig Beachtung gefunden haben.

Im Mittelpunkt stehen Filme und Stimmen, welche die Komplexität sozio-kultureller Zusammenhänge in Iran beleuchten. Die Filme werden von Wissenschaftler*innen des Orient-Instituts Istanbul vorgestellt und von Dialogen mit Filmemacher*innen und Expert*innen aus den jeweiligen Bereichen begleitet. Durch die Verbindung von künstlerischer Praxis mit wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen möchte das Filmforum unterschiedliche Sichtweisen ins Gespräch bringen. Die drei Themenblöcke laden das Publikum ein, mit eigenen Perspektiven an dem Austausch zwischen Wissenschaftler*innen und Filmemacher*innen teilzunehmen.

 

Das Filmforum wird in Kooperation mit dem Goethe Institut Istanbul ausgerichtet und gastiert über 3 Tage im Kinosaal des Institut Français. Die Veranstaltung findet auf Türkisch statt, Filme und Redebeiträge werden durch Untertitelungen  und Simultanübersetzung ins Türkische übersetzt.

 

Für die Teilnahme ist eine Anmeldung erforderlich. Untenstehend können Sie dabei einen oder mehrere gewünschte Programmblöcke wählen. Zum Programm

Das Filmforum ist für alle Besucher:innen kostenlos. Der Einlass vor Ort erfolgt über Vorlage eines Identifikationsnachweis und gültigen HES-Code.

​

Iran at the Crossways | Filmforum (filmforum-iran.org)

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 17 January 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

As is the case with many other former Ottoman regions, Romania’s relation with its imperial Ottoman legacy is a complex, multilayered, contradictory, and ambiguous one. These ambiguities seem to permeate almost every aspect of 19^th and 20^th century’s Romanian culture and society in the constructivist spirit of searching for roots while building a new and modern nation state. However, the double role of being both subject and agent of an Orientalist gaze becomes even more apparent in visual culture. Artists Carol Popp de Szathmary (1812-1887), born and educated in Habsburg Transylvania, and Theodor Aman (1831-1891), the descendent of an Aromanian merchant from Oltenia, represent two of the kaleidoscopic discourses on what was perceived and constructed as Oriental in 19^th century Romania. Both used various artistic mediums and techniques in their work, cultivated a tight knit relationship with Romanian central authorities and nationalists, and were quite adept in what would today be called marketing strategies. This talk will address the complexities of their artworks as products of social representations of history (Pascal Ory) making use of specific conventions of representation (Peter Burke) that mediate a certain text as image/image as text approach to art.

 

Dr. Roxana Coman has studied Art History and Romanian Modern History at the University of Bucharest, with a BA and MA in Art History and a PhD in History. Volunteering during her BA and MA studies in the National Museum of Art of Romania, she has worked between 2016 and 2022 as a curator and museum educator in the Bucharest Municipality Museum.

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 10 January 2022 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Dr. Anastasios B. Nikopoulos

Thessaloniki

 

12 January 2022, 19:00

Orient-Institut Istanbul

 

Reevaluating the Institutional Autonomy of 14^th Century Mount Athos under the Ottomans: The “Confiscation Issue” with Regard to Athonian Landholdings in Postbyzantine Macedonia

 

The self-governed monastic community of Mount Athos is the only surviving monastic center of many that once existed in the extensive territory of the previous Byzantine Empire. Τhis sο-called monastic democracy situated on the peninsula of Chalkidiki in Northern Greece, covers an area of about 335,000 acres and has held significant real estate through its numerous dependencies (metochia), especially in the wider area of Macedonia and Thrace as well as on the islands of the North Aegean. The dependences occupied a total area about ten times that of the Athos peninsula, which is distributed among the 20 Athonite Monasteries. The foundation of the Athonian monastic community dates back to the 8^th century. From the 9^th century onwards, the Byzantine emperors took care to endow it with a unique legal status, characterized by institutional self-sufficiency, which has ensured its survival to the present day.

In the 1380s, when Thrace and Macedonia submitted to Ottoman rule in a first phase of conquest, Mount Athos and its monastic domains, located in this area, seem to have been granted a special legal status, which by all indications was the result of timely and reliable negotiations.

It has been argued, however, that the Ottoman overlords caused massive deprivation by confiscating landed property and dependencies of the monasteries, right from the beginning of the conquest. It has recently been argued by drawing on selected archival documents of the late 14^th century that even those Athonite monasteries, traditionally believed to have preserved all their properties thanks to their bargaining submission to the Ottomans, suffered severe losses.

This lecture will question the traditional view on these presumed “confiscations” on the basis of a thorough reexamination of the extant primary sources held at different Athonian monasteries. It will be argued that a reinterpretation of the legal acts in question will show that the Ottoman administrative practice has in fact preserved and upheld for future centuries the protection of institutional autonomy for Mount Athos.

 

Dr. Anastasios B. Nikopoulos is an achieved jurist and a legal historian of Byzantine law.

After studying law at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, he continued his studies on the postgraduate level in International Humanitarian Law at the Institut International de Droit Humanitaire at San Remo, Italy, and in Constitutional Law at the Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Staatsrecht in Heidelberg, Germany. He is a former member of the Greek Parliament. As a jurist, he has been a legal adviser to the Greek Ministry of Defense and he continues to serve as a legal counsellor for the Holy Monastic Community of Mount Athos.

In 2019, he earned his PhD in Byzantine Studies under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis at Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the legal status of Mount Athos under Byzantine Rule (8^th-15^th centuries). He has published widely on Greek constitutional and administrative law. As a legal historian he has made a name for himself as one of the foremost experts on the Byzantine legal history with a special focus on the legal status of the autonomous monastic community of Mount Athos. Dr. Nikopoulos’ doctoral thesis has been published in Greek in 2021 (Η διάπλαση του αρχαίου καθεστώτος του Αγίου Όρους. Ι, Η Βυζαντινή περίοδος 8^ος αι. – αρχές 15^ου αι) by the Center for Patristic Studies in Thessaloniki.

 

 

 

Abstract:

This talk presents a newly published edited volume about debates on language policy and planning in the Republic of Turkey. The eight chapters deal with various aspects related to both the official language Turkish and the other languages used in Turkey, whether autochthonous minority languages or languages that have recently become important through migration. For their analyses, the authors, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds like Turkology, political science or history, use methods like discourse analysis, mixed-method approaches or concepts from the field of linguistic landscapes research.

Topics include re-evaluations of the Turkish Language Reform of the 1920s and 1930s, analyses of debates concerning the Turkish language in connection with questions of gender, loanwords and use in political speeches, the language on public and private signs, demands raised in connection with the so-called “Democratic Opening” initiated in 2009 or the migration of refugees from Syria since 2011. Attention to current developments also provides new perspectives on the early phase of language policy in Turkey and the question whether such developments can be seen as continuities or discontinuities. In any case, this book makes an engaging contribution to what seems to be “a never-ending story”.

About the speakers:

Prof. Jens Peter Laut studied comparative religion, Turkish studies and Indian studies at the Universities of Marburg and Giessen. In 1980, he obtained his M.A. degree with a Master’s thesis on “Buddhist Ideas of Hell (with Special Reference to Old Turkish Texts)”. From 1980 until 1984, he was engaged in the project “Loanwords of Indic Origin in Old Turkish” at the University of Giessen. In February 1985, his dissertation in Turkish Studies on “The Uighur Text ‘Maitrisimit’ and Its Importance for the Early History of Turkish Buddhism” was accepted by the University of Giessen. From 1985 until 1988, he was engaged in a project at the University of Tübingen (“The Tübingen Atlas of the Middle East”, TAVO) and published two historical maps of the Ottoman Empire and a book on “Asia Minor in the 17^th Century”. From June 1989 until December 1991, he received a post-doctoral scholarship from the DFG. He submitted his habilitation thesis on “Language Reform in Modern Turkey” in 1993 to the University of Göttingen. This degree was granted in November 1993. From 1996 to 2008, he was Professor of Islamic studies/Turkology at the University of Freiburg. Since October 2008, he has been Professor and Director of the Department of Turkology and Central Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen.

Dr. Ruth Bartholomä has been a research fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul since October 2019. She studied Islamic studies and Slavic studies at the University of Freiburg (Germany), spent one year at the University of Samarqand (Uzbekistan) and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 2005 with a thesis on the Hungarian Turkologist Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913). In 2011, she received her PhD in Turkology from the University of Giessen (Germany) with a thesis on phenomena of language change in the lexis of the Tatar literary language between the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 21^st centuries. From 2012 to 2014, she was interim professor for Islamic studies/Turkology at the University of Freiburg where she held the position of a “junior professor” from April 2014 to September 2019. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics. Currently she is conducting a research project on language policy and planning in the Republic of Turkey after 1980.

WICHTIGE ANMERKUNG: Diese Veranstaltung wird online per ZOOM organisiert. Für Ihre Registrierung senden Sie bitte bis zum 6. Dezember (Montag) eine Email mit Ihrem Namen an events@oiist.net.

Wir informieren Sie danach über die Zugangsdaten.

Deutsche Institutionen in Istanbul in den Jahren 1933 bis 1944

Die Geschichte deutscher Gemeinden im Ausland während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus ist Gegenstand fundierter Untersuchungen. Entfernt von abstrakter Theoriebildung betrachtet der Vortrag die soziale Praxis vor Ort und liefert einen Überblick über die einsetzenden Prozesse in deutschen Institutionen im Zeitraum von 1933 bis 1944.

Mit der nationalsozialistischen »Machtergreifung« im Jahr 1933 wurden alle staatlichen Einrichtungen des Deutschen Reiches »gleichgeschaltet«. Dies betraf ebenso die Einrichtungen im Ausland wie das Deutsche Archäologische Institut in Istanbul. Die Untersuchung der Geschichte der Abteilung eröffnete auf der Basis des vorliegenden Aktenmaterials Einblick in die sich verändernde auswärtige Kulturpolitik unter dem NS-Regime. Damit einher ging die Instrumentalisierung des Institutes als auch der wissenschaftlichen Disziplin zugunsten der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda.

Der Vortrag betrachtet darüber hinaus nicht nur die Implementierung von NS-Strukturen und Gedankengut in weiteren deutschen Einrichtungen sondern auch den Prozess der Vereinnahmung sowie die aktive Mitwirkung lokaler Akteure der Deutschen Gemeinde in Istanbul, die sich mit dem NS-Staat arrangierten. Jene Akteure in der Metropole am Bosporus zeigten in ihren Entscheidungen ein ambivalentes Verhalten, das zwischen diplomatischem Geschick im türkischen Umfeld sowie Loyalität gegenüber dem nationalsozialistischem Regime rangierte.

Lebenslauf Daniel Bauer

Der gebürtige Oberpfälzer studierte in Erlangen Geschichte, Germanistik und Philosophie sowie an der University of Liverpool in Großbritannien. Von 2010 bis 2012 absolvierte er sein Referendariat für das gymnasiale Lehramt im bayerischen Staatsdienst in der fränkischen Metropolregion Nürnberg und Fürth. Seine Promotion im Fach „Neuere und neueste Geschichte“ über die „Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in Stadt und Land Rothenburg ob der Tauber 1933-1945. Eine regionalgeschichtliche Untersuchung“ schloss er im Jahr 2013 ab und begann als Bundesprogrammlehrkraft über die Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen seine Lehrtätigkeit als Gymnasiallehrer am Istanbul Erkek Lisesi in Sultan Ahmed. Seit September 2017 wirkt er in den Fächern Geschichte und Deutsch als Auslandsdienstlehrkraft des Bundes als Lehrer an der Deutschen Schule in Ankara.

 

 

Abstract:

Like Yusuf Akçura, Abdullah Battal-Taymas and other intellectuals of Tatar origin, Sadri Maksudi Arsal (1879–1957) from Kazan played an important role for the construction and development of the Turkish Republic. He met Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and made important contributions to the Kemalist reforms of law, politics, history and language. His role in the Turkish Language Reform is often underestimated. In his huge book Türk Dili İçin (‘For the Sake of the Turkish Language’) he defended the idea of establishing a pure modern Turkish literary language not only for Turkey, but for all Turkic people in the world. He analyzed the language reforms of several other nations like the Romans, Arabs, Germans, French, Czech, Finns, Russians and Hungarians and explained that Turkish, in his view one of the richest and most ingenious languages in the world, should be reformed accordingly. He was convinced it was possible to replace almost all loan and foreign words with genuine Turkish words and expressions taken from the spoken language in Turkey and its dialects, from Ancient Turkish and other Turkic idioms, or with new words coined with the help of the rich fundus of Turkish suffixes. This idea was crucial during the first period of the Kemalist language reform. The book had considerable impact on Mustafa Kemal who wrote a short preface for it saying that an independent nation needs an independent language. These words became the main slogan of the language reform and are cited in numerous studies. The contents of Maksudi’s book, however, mostly did not become the subject of a deeper analysis. Max Scherberger will take a closer look at the book and Maksudi’s ideas about the Turkish language and its reform.

About the speaker:

Max Scherberger studied Islamic studies and history at the University of Freiburg (1993–2000). From 2000 to 2003 he worked at CEBHEM (the Center for the Economic and Business History of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East), a project at the University of Tübingen that included studies in the Archives of Poche (Aleppo) and the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office (Istanbul). In 2019 he graduated from the Department of Turkology and Central Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen with a PhD dissertation about Sadri Maksudi Arsal and his book Türk Dili İçin (about to be published). His main research fields are Eastern Middle Turkic ascension literature, Ottoman-Safavid relations, Ottoman and modern Turkish, Language Reform in Turkey. His publications include: “Türk dili, dillerin en zenginlerindendir”: Sadri Maksudi’nin Türk Dili için adlı kitabına bir bakış (2019), Der tatarisch-türkische Intellektuelle Sadri Maksudi Arsal (1878–1957) und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des Türkentums in Russland und in der Türkei (2013), Das Mi‘rāǧnāme. Die Himmel- und Höllenfahrt des Propheten Muḥammad in der osttürkischen Überlieferung (2003).

 

Abstract:

The Ottoman Empire was a fundamentally multilingual society. In the course of the late Ottoman and early Republican period, certain policies, rules and practices were introduced in order to influence the linguistic situation and to establish the dominant language in the society, without a perspective for maintaining its linguistic diversity. In this talk Dr. Nevra Lischewski introduces a conceptual framework of language planning. In doing so she undertakes a detailed, long-term analysis of the linguistic situation, policies and practices of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey with the aim of explaining linguistic issues by addressing larger social and political matters and of evoking awareness of multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

About the speaker:

Dr. Nevra Lischewski is lecturer of Ottoman and modern Turkish at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Munich. She studied linguistics at Ankara University and then worked as a Turkish language instructor at the Language Centre of Ankara University. In Germany, she continued to work as a Turkish language instructor at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies and the Language Centre of the University of Munich. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Linguistics with minors in Turkish studies and intercultural communication at the University of Munich. She received her PhD in Turkology and linguistics at the University of Munich.

Her research interest as a linguist focuses on the social aspects of language. Hence, language is not an object that can be considered in isolation, but rather is a social practice that is inseparable from its social and historical context. She applies this view on language, which refers to the disciplines of sociolinguistic and linguistic ecology, in her PhD thesis “Sociolinguistic Profile and Language Planning of the Ottoman Empire between 1850–1950” (soon to be published by Harrassowitz under the title “From Multilingualism to Monolingualism”).

 

 

Das Filmforum präsentiert Kurz- und Dokumentarfilme, die Einblicke in aktuelle Forschungsprojekte des Orient-Instituts Istanbul aus den Forschungsfeldern „Musikwissenschaft“, „Mensch, Medizin und Gesellschaft“ sowie „Religionsforschung“ geben.

 

Das Filmforum findet von 12. bis 13. November 2021 online statt und ist kostenlos. Filme und Redebeiträge werden deutsch untertitelt und sind für Schwerhörige und Gehörlose barrierefrei zugänglich. Für die Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung bitten wir um eine Anmeldung.

 

Im Januar 2022 findet eine Spiegelveranstaltung des Filmforums in Istanbul statt. Nähere Informationen dazu und alle weiteren Daten finden Sie zu gegebenem Zeitpunkt hier.

 

Das Programm mit allen Details finden Sie hier

 

Abstract:

The Turkish Language Reform is one of the most fascinating cultural projects of the first half of the 20^th century. Throughout the 1920s, numerous distinguished linguists from Hungary, Soviet Russia and Poland visited the University of Istanbul and maintained close contacts with Turkish academia. Mészaros Gyula, Wilhelm Barthold and Süreyya Szapszal were important inspirers, commentators and co-shapers of the Turkish linguistic purism of the 1920s. Neglected by international scholarship, Hungarian, Polish and Russian specialists along with the Turkic exiled linguists based in Istanbul and Ankara heavily contributed to the Language Reform in Turkey by knowledge and experience transfer. The paper tries to shed light on the East European impact on the Language Reform in Turkey in the 1920–30s.

About the speaker:

Dr. Zaur Gasimov studied international relations, international law and history in Baku and Berlin. In 2009, he graduated from the PhD program at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and joined the Leibniz-Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. From 2013 to 2019, Gasimov was a Senior Research Fellow at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2020, Gasimov joined the Russian Studies Department of the University of Bonn, Germany, as a DFG Principal Investigator. He has published extensively on Russian-Turkish relations and entangled history of Eastern Europe and the Middle East (last monograph: Historical Dictionary of Azerbaijan, New Edition, Rowman & Littlefield 2018).

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture via Zoom, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 25 October 2021 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

INVITATION TO AN ONLINE LECTURE

Dr. phil. Suna Suner

(Don Juan Archiv Wien)

 

Studies on Culture and Diplomacy –

Projects at Don Juan Archiv Wien: OTTOMANIA, DIPLOMATICA, BRASILIENSIA

 

Wednesday, 27 October 2021, 19:00 (Turkish time; GMT +3)

 

Don Juan Archiv Wien is a research institute in Vienna dedicated to theatre history and cultural history, conducting scholarly and cultural projects mainly concerned with the global history of theatre. Since 2008 Don Juan Archiv has undertaken a long-lasting project of conference and publication series, OTTOMANIA, which is centralized on the cultural transfers between the Ottoman Empire and Europe with a focus on the performing arts. The project OTTOMANIA, with the cooperations established within, and its results have led to the launching of a new conference and publication series in 2016, DIPLOMATICA: mainly dedicated to the interrelations of culture and diplomacy, this series focuses on the exploration of the cultural aspects of diplomacy up to the 19th century in the European and Ottoman contexts. The first three editions of the series DIPLOMATICA are currently in preparation: Culture and Diplomacy, Gender and Diplomacy and Performing Diplomacy in the Early Modern World.

A new third series, BRASILIENSIA, focuses on the cultural transfers between Europe and Latin America. The first volume is dedicated to the first performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni outside of Europe in Rio de Janeiro in 1821, and its cultural-political context.
These projects and their manifold aspects might invite colleagues working in the field of culture and diplomacy for future cooperation.

 

Dr.phil. Suna Suner is a theatre researcher, singer, stage artist. Born in Ankara, she studied Translation & Interpreting at Hacettepe University (B.A., 1996). Taught at Istanbul Bilgi University between the years 1996–2002 and in 2004 received her M.A. degree in Performing Arts from the Middlesex University in London. Numerous stage works and productions in music, theatre and performance disciplines in Ankara (1990–1996), in Istanbul (1996–2002), in London (2003–2004) and in Vienna (since 2004). Since 2007 she has been a member of the Don Juan Archiv Wien’s team, specialising in the history of theatre and diplomacy in the Ottoman- European context. Since 2008 she has co-directed and organized the Don Juan Archiv Wien’s international symposia series “Ottoman Empire & European Theatre”. In 2013 received her PhD from the Institute of Theatre, Film & Media Studies of the University of Vienna. She is co-editor of the Don Juan Archiv Wien’s publication series OTTOMANIA and DIPLOMATICA.

To attend this lecture, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 18 October 2021 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

INVITATION TO AN ONLINE LECTURE

“Fabrics of Devotion: Religious Textiles in the Eastern Mediterranean”

 

 

The Jewish Prayer Shawl Tallit

 

Dr. Esther Juhasz (Shenkar College /The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)

 

Wednesday, 20 October 2021, 19:00 (Turkish time, GMT+3)

 

The tallit, the fringed garment, is worn by observant Jewish males to this day. The appending of the fringes – tzitzit – to one’s attire is a fundamental biblical commandment, and its significance transcends the realm of dress. Its fulfillment is deemed equivalent to the fulfillment of all the mitzvot (commandments) a Jew is expected to perform.

The commandment is imbued with mnemonic, mystical, and magical meanings, and is expressed in the halakhic literature and in the wealth of local custom and interpretation. These bear on such material matters as the fabric, size, color, and knotting of the tassels, on who may make the tallit or knot the tassel strings, and on how, when, and where the garments should be worn and more. Drawing on decades of research of aspects Sephardi material culture in the Ottoman Empire and on her experience working with the ethnographic collections of The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Esther Juhasz will shed light onto the vital role and the multiple implications of threads, knots, fringes, and fabrics in Jewish ritual life, past and present.

 

 

Dr. Esther Juhasz is a researcher of Jewish material culture who studies dress, textiles and visual religion in the intersection between art, folk culture and popular culture. She has worked for many years in curatorial and research positions at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. There she specialized in ethnography and published the book Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Aspects of Material Culture (1990) for which she received the Dawidowic Prize for Ethnography and Folklore.

She holds an M.A in Art History and a Ph.D. in the Folklore and Folk Culture Studies department at the Hebrew University. Currently she is teaching at Shenkar College of Engineering Design and Art in Ramat Gan. Her recent publications include The Jewish Wardrobe. From The Collections of the Israel Museum (2012), of which she is both the editor and principal author, Trousseau Lists of Jewish Brides from Izmir Between an Official  document and a Personal Narrative (2015), and Visibility, Perception and Memory in Clothes: Dilemmas of Identity in the Dress of Jewish Women in Immigrant Communities (2020).

 

Photo: Tzitzit (fringes) of the Tallit. © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Mauro Magliani

 

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM

To attend this lecture, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 11 October 2021 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

 

Many historical vestments and church fabrics of the Greek Orthodox rite survive today in monastic sacristies and museums. Until now, textile and dress scholars have primarily focused on their ultimate origin, historic evolution, and dogmatic meaning. In my view, these important material remnants inform us on underexplored dynamics in the society that produced them and illuminate the ways in which trends originating from different milieus were appropriated within clerical context. As reflections of cultural, religious, and artistic identity, ecclesial fabrics can offer insights on the Church’s association to religious otherness and profane, or better, court aesthetics. Focusing on liturgical textiles and vestments, the lecture will discuss how the “Islamic” and “secular” elements were negotiated by the Church during Byzantine and Ottoman times. Essentially, our discussion will be centered on the tension between the usefulness and the limitations these taxonomies present when studying premodern church material culture.

 

Nikolaos Vryzidis is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His scholarly work explores issues of identity in relation to material culture, and especially ecclesial textiles and metalwork, in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean, subjects on which he has written more than twenty articles and book chapters. In 2016 he convened a conference on Mediterranean textiles, which resulted in an edited volume of essays (The Hidden Life of Textiles in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean) published by Brepols in 2020. He also pursues research in cross-cultural aspects of medieval art, part of which will be published in a forthcoming volume on the religious arts that he currently co-edits.

This lecture is part of the lecture series „Fabrics of Devotion: Religious Textiles in the Eastern Mediterranean“

 

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM

 

Topkapı Sarayı’ndaki Din Konulu Tekstillere Genel Bir Bakış

 

Prof. Dr. Hülya Tezcan (Nişantaşı Üniversitesi):

 

Çarşamba, 29 Eylül 2021, 18:00 (GMT+3)

 

Topkapı Sarayı Padişah Elbiseleri Koleksiyonu’nda seksen yedi adet tılsımlı gömlek, bir yaka, beş takke, on yazılı örtüden oluşan yaklaşık yüz civarında eser bulunur. Bu gömleklerin kişiyi hastalıklara ve türlü kötülüklere karşı koruduğuna, hastalara şifa verdiğine ve giyeni savaşta muzaffer kıldığına inanılırdı. Tılsımlı gömlekler aharlanarak kâğıt özelliği kazandırılmış ince pamuklu kumaşlardan dikilmiştir. Üzerlerine Kur’an ayetleri, Allah’ın güzel isimleri, semboller, hat, nakışlar, ve rakamlar (cifr) ile ibarelerden (vefk) oluşan geometrik şekiller yazılmıştır. Topkapı Sarayı Koleksiyonu’nda yaldızlı, çok değerli hat ve tezhiplerle süslenmiş padişahlara ve hanedana ait gömleklerin yanında dervişler tarafından kullanılan daha mütevazi tılsımlı gömlek örnekleri de bulunur. Bu tılsımlı kıyafetler, kitap sanatları ile Osmanlı giyim kuşam âdetlerinin çok ilgi çekici bir sentezidir.

Topkapı Sarayı Koleksiyonları’nda bulunan din konulu tekstillere başka örnekler olarak Kâbe örtüleri (kisve) ve her sene İstanbul’dan Mekke’ye bir kervanla hediye gönderilen surre çadırları gösterilebilir. 1517 senesinden itibaren Osmanlı padişahları her sene Kâbe’ye yeni bir örtü yaptırmış ve altın iplerle işlenen bu örtüler, belirli ritüeller eşliğinde surre alayları ile Mekke’ye gönderilmiştir.

Bu konuşmada, uzun yıllar Topkapı Sarayı Padişah Elbiseleri Koleksiyonu’nun küratörlüğünü yapan Prof. Dr. Hülya Tezcan bu koleksiyona genel bir bakış sunacak ve eserlerin önemini ve çeşitliliğini anlatacaktır. Tezcan, İslam kültürünün tekstil boyutunun incelenmesi adına zengin bir arşiv arz eden bu koleksiyona dair tecrübelerini de bizimle paylaşacaktır.

 

 

Prof. Dr. Hülya Tezcan, İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Sanat Tarihi Bölümü’nden 1968 yılında mezun oldu. 1971’de Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi’nde göreve başlayan Tezcan, 1978’den itibaren Padişah Elbiseleri Bölümü sorumlusu olarak çalıştı ve 2006’da emekli oldu. Müzede çalıştığı yıllarda, akademik kariyerine Bizans arkeolojisi alanında bir doktora tezi ile devam etti. Yüzün üzerinde makalesi, ansiklopedi maddesi, ulusal ve uluslararası konferans bildirisi vardır. Yayınlarından bazıları: Atlaslar Atlası (1993), İpek. Osmanlı Dokuma Sanatı (2001, Nurhan Atasoy ve Walter Denny ile), Sarayın Terzisi: M.Palma – D.Lena – P.Parma (2008), Tılsımlı Gömlekler (2011) ve Kutsal Mekânlarda Kutsanmış Örtüler: Topkapı Sarayı’ndan Örneklerle Kâbe Örtüleri (2017). Prof. Dr. Tezcan Nişantaşı Üniversitesi, Tekstil ve Moda Tasarımı Bölümü’nde ders vermektedir.

 

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM

Click here for the Program

 

Digital Humanities in Ottoman and Turkish Studies:

Initiatives, Projects, and Online Resources

June 24, 20:00 – 22:00 (Turkish time, GMT+3)

An online event organized by the

Orient-Institut Istanbul (OII) and Digital Ottoman Studies (DOS)

Prior registration will be necessary

 

Registration Information: 

The meeting will be held online via Zoom.

To attend this lecture, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by June 22, 2021 (Tuesday) at the latest.

For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. Zoom links will be provided upon registration.

 

 

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM.

 

 

To attend this lecture, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by June 14, 2021 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

 

Living the Love of the Imams in Twelver Shi’a Islam in Iran. Objects and Materials as a Vehicle for Devotion

 

Sepideh Parsapajouh (CNRS-CéSor/EHESS)

sepideh.parsapajouh@ehess.fr

 

In Twelver Shi’ism, as in many other religions, devotion and piety are not merely conceptual and ideational nor are they directed towards a purely abstract God. Twelver Shi’a consists of a set of beliefs and practices dedicated primarily to fourteen holy figures: The Prophet Muhammad, his daughter, Fatimah al-Zahrâ, and the twelve Imams are known as the fourteen infallibles or 14 ma’sum that are woven together and developed by believers in order to lead them to God. Concrete materials such as time, places, objects, and even persons mediate believers’ connections to the holy figures and act as vehicles for devotion. In this presentation, after a short introduction to Twelver Shi’ism, I will address the issue of religious materiality in the life of some Iranian Imamite Shi’a groups on three levels: in their daily lives; in the ceremonies and particular rituals on annual occasions, and finally in pious visits (ziyârat). This presentation is based on the results of field research, the methodology of which I will briefly discuss. It will also be articulated with some anthropological concepts and ideas that my colleagues, Michel Boivin, Annabelle Collinet and Delphine Ortis, and I put forward and discussed in a seminar based on research conducted over four years (2015-2019) at the EHESS (Paris), entitled “Material Culture and Devotional Practices in Shi’a Societies”.

 

Sepideh Parsapajouh is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research – Center for Social Research on Religion (CéSor-EHESS). Her first research focused on an Iranian slum where she uncovered an order based on various solidarity mechanisms. This research led her to the importance of value systems and religious beliefs in the balance of a society. Since 2010, she has been studying various aspects of popular Shi’a religion, individual and collective, intimate and spectacular, in Iran and beyond, in particular practices related to death, devotion, and the worship of saints and martyrs, faith and acts in which the material and the spiritual are intertwined. Her publications include: Au cœur d’un bidonville Iranien, Paris, Karthala-IFRI, 2016 ;  Cimetières et tombes dans les mondes musulmans à la croisée des enjeux religieux, politiques et mémoriels, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Université de Provence, n° 146 (with Mathieu Terrier), 2019 ; Religions en Iran, special issue Archives de sciences sociales des religions (ASSR), éditions de l’EHESS, n° 189, (with  Sabrina Mervin), 2020; Bodies and Artefacts : Relics and other devotional supports in Shia societies in the Indic and Iranian worlds, special issue of Islamic Material Culture, édition de Brill, n° 1, (with Annabelle Collinet and Michel Boivin), 2021.

Poster image: Procession participants carrying a standard (Karaj, Ashura, 2007). kindly provided by Sepideh Parsapajouh.

 

 

Please click here for the program.

 

 

 

 

 

Please click here for the program.

 

 

 

Music and Mirrored Hybridities.
Cultural Communities Converging in French, German, and Turkish Stage Productions (17^th–20^th Century)

Friday, 28.05.2021, 13:30–17:30, 19:00–20:30 GMT+3

Saturday, 29.05.2021, 10:00–12:30 GMT+3

IMPORTANT NOTICE – To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary.

Please register using the following link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MHghmuvISuehvqV64_iS-g

You will receive a confirmation e-mail with the login link one day prior to the event. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

Representations of Turks or Ottomans have been popular with European audiences for centuries, and for good reason. In early modern France, musico-theatrical patterns of portraying the foreign Other (later called ‘Turquerie’, ‘exoticism’ or ‘orientalism’) helped to classify the current condition of the bilateral relations with the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, hybridity has to be understood as a processual and dynamic practice playing with cultural mixtures and borrowings, albeit possibly (re-)producing inequalities, misunderstandings and clichés. There is no claim of cultural – or musical – authenticity in these works; rather, they appear as musical features emerging out of vague inspirations derived from Ottoman/Turkish music, creating a particular sound that could easily be decoded as ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Turkish’ by French listeners.

In this workshop, we want to address the convergence of cultural communities on stage, and the conditions and contexts of this convergence, using as a point of departure the example of the iconic ‘Turkish scene’ from Lully/Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). International scholars of various disciplines will explore its musical, theatrical, and choreographic reception, focusing on two principal axes: (I) 17^th– and 18^th-century adaptions in France and the German lands, and (II) 20^th-century translations and (musical) revisions in Turkey and Germany. The workshop will bring together researchers including those whose cultures were considered as ‘Other’, along with researchers whose own cultures portrayed foreign cultures as ‘Other’, in order to facilitate critical engagement with these historical and cultural representations.

Keynote Speaker:

Thomas Betzwieser (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)

 

Organizers:

Judith I. Haug (Orient-Institut Istanbul, Turkey), haug@oiist.org

Hanna Walsdorf (HMT Leipzig, Germany), hanna.walsdorf@hmt-leipzig.de

Leipzig)

in collaboration with the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi.

 

 

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM.

 

Please click here for the abstract booklet.

 

 

Please click here for the program.

 

 

 

 

Please click here for the program.

To attend this virtual lecture series, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to info@mappinggenderneareast.org by May 4, 2021 (Tuesday) at the latest.

 

Please click here for the program.

 

To attend this virtual lecture series, prior registration is necessary. Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to info@mappinggenderneareast.org by April 26, 2021 (Monday) at the latest.

 

 

 

Klasik Türk müziği fasıl repertuarının en uzun ve karmaşık sözlü eser formu olan kâr, 17. yüzyıldan itibaren güfte mecmualarında kendine yer bulmuş, hattâ bu kaynaklardaki bazı kârların melodileri günümüze kadar ulaşmıştır. Güfteleri genellikle Farsça olan bu eserlerin önemli bir kısmının 15. yüzyılın efsanevi müzik bilgini Abdülkâdir Merâgî’ye atfedilmesi modern dönem müzikologlarınca şüpheyle karşılanmış, hattâ 17. yüzyıl öncesinden kalan yazılı kaynakları dikkate alan kimi müzikologlar sözkonusu eserlerin 17. yüzyıldan önce bestelenmiş olamayacağı kanaatine varmışlardır. Bu görüşe göre kâr formu, 17. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında vücuda getirildiği varsayılan fasıl anlayışının bir ürünü olmakla birlikte yapı ve dil özellikleri bakımından önceki dönemlerin formlarına öykünerek geliştirilmişti.

Bu bildiride yukarıdaki yargıların geçerliliği, aralarında 17. yüzyıl öncesinden kalan kaynakların da bulunduğu birçok el yazmasında karşılaşılan bilgiler üzerinden sorgulanacaktır. Kâr eski gelenekle bağ kurmak için 17. yüzyılda “icat edilen” bir form muydu, yoksa önceki dönemlerden gelen bir devamlılıktan söz edilebilir mi? Bugün icrâ edilen kârlar ne kadar geriye götürülebilir? Kâr formundaki eserler tavır bakımından hangi dönemi ve nasıl bir anlayışı temsil etmektedir? Şifahi aktarım, nazariyattaki değişimler ve icrâ tavırları arasındaki farklılıklar kâr formunu yapı ve stil bakımından nasıl etkilemiş olabilir? İddia edildiği gibi bütün Merâgî repertuvarı 17. yüzyıl mahsulü müydü? Daha önceki dönemlere ait eserlerin yüzyılların yıpratıcı etkisinden kurtularak sonraki yüzyıllara, hattâ günümüze ulaşabilmesi mümkün müdür? Bildiride bu sorulara cevap aranırken repertuvarda hâlâ mevcudiyetini koruyan bir eserin 15. yüzyıla kadar uzanan izleri sürülecektir.

 

Dr. Mehmet Uğur Ekinci 1982 yılında Ankara’da doğdu. Bilkent Üniversitesi Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü’nden lisans, Bilkent Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü’nden yüksek lisans ve Londra Üniversitesi SOAS Siyaset ve Uluslararası Çalışmalar Bölümü’nden doktora derecesi aldı. Müzik çalışmalarına üniversite yıllarında kanun öğrenerek başlayan Ekinci, Osmanlı dönemi Türk müziğinin yazılı kaynakları ve tarihsel icra pratiği üzerine araştırmalar yapmaktadır. Yayınlanmış çalışmaları arasında Kevserî Mecmûası: 18. Yüzyıl Saz Müziği Külliyatı (Pan, 2016) bulunmaktadır.

To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 25 January 2021 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Despite the growing literature on Ottoman photography, depictions of Mevlevis in particular continue to be considered a vestige of Orientalist thinking. The established narrative locates the images of Mevlevi dervishes alongside other ‘Oriental types.’ What is the raison d’etre of the photographs of Mevlevis, street vendors and artisans, all of which were either generated by an external eye (a Westerner) or by a local photographer? The resulting images were on high demand by market forces because they displayed cultural and religious authenticity fitting comfortably into the Orientalist configuration, from head to toe. I argue that this rather simplistic way of understanding needs to be reconciled with a less controversial narrative because it runs the risk of oversimplification of the complexities and nuances those images carry.

This paper starts by questioning the prejudices and gaps in current knowledge, offers a fresh look into the subject matter with the aim of offering a reassessment within the framework of mutual interactions between the Mevlevis and photography. More precisely, by connecting the issue to certain characteristics of the Mevlevi order, I will seek to explore the role of the dervishes in their visual representations as well as to scrutinize the multiple meanings of photography within the dervish communities.

Onur Öner received his PhD degree in History from Istanbul Şehir University in 2019. The title of the thesis is “A Collective Biography Study of Musicians from the Late Ottoman through the Early Republican Periods.” As a social historian, he has a keen interest in cultural studies.

Different forms of life narratives, Late Ottoman biographical accounts, and visual representations through photography, in particular, form the main areas of his academic interests. Dr. Onur Öner is an independent scholar and works as a content developer at TRT2. Among his recent publications are “Understanding social change: demographic analyses of musicians in late Ottoman Istanbul”, in Middle Eastern Studies (2021), DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2020.1858809, and “Music in Early Twentieth Century Istanbul: Reconsidering the Role of Private Music Schools”, in Archiv Orientalni, forthcoming in 89/1 (May 2021).

 

 

 

To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 11 January 2021 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

From the 10th century onward, Byzantine music teachers created and developed a music notation by using musical signs. Since the late 14th century it has also been used for the transcriptions of secular repertoire. The quantitative evidence is impressive: A total of 4,200 pages containing transcribed secular pieces bear witness to a total of approximately 1050 works recorded, within them Ottoman court music, Phanariot songs, Persian art music, as well as a few Greek folk songs. For the vast majority, these recordings are in the so-called Old Method, a kind of musical shorthand. With the introduction of the New Method, these works fell into disuse and obscurity for various reasons; so these musical signs of notation remained silent.

Kyriakos Kalaitzidis’s study “Post-Byzantine Music Manuscripts as a Source for Oriental Secular Music”, published by the Orient-Institut Istanbul, gave a new perspective to the study and performance of Oriental Secular Music, as preserved in the Post-Byzantine Music Manuscripts. The transcription into staff notation, the publication, and ultimately, the performance and recording of this largely unknown repertoire brings to life unknown aspects of this great shared Middle Eastern musical heritage both in terms of musical practice and in its deeper understanding.

Dr. Kyriakos Kalaitzidis is a scholar and active musician in the field of modal secular music of the post-Byzantine era and Mediterranean traditions. As a member of „En Chordais“ or as soloist he has performed more than 2,000 concerts in 45 countries at major festivals and venues. He has given lectures and master classes at various universities in Europe, the Middle East, and the USA. Kyriakos’ discography includes recordings of local traditions, the presentation of unknown art music works, as well as his own compositions. His PhD „Post-Byzantine Music Manuscripts as a Source for Oriental Secular Music“ was published by the Orient-Institut Istanbul.

 

 

Mapping Gender in the Near East

What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

An international and interdisciplinary workshop

December 9-10, 2020

Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, this workshop will establish, consolidate and sustain a network of academics who share an interest in women’s and gender studies with regard to the Ottoman world and modern Turkey. Leading scholars across several major fields – including history, literature, and interdisciplinary studies – will examine recent theoretical discourses and challenges in the area of women’s and gender studies and contribute to steering the field in innovative directions.

This workshop is designed to address two problems in women’s and gender studies: the lack of transnational and comparative scholarship, as well as the dearth of interdisciplinary collaboration. This workshop responds to the fact that the scholarly literatures in women’s and gender studies in the Ottoman-Turkish milieu and in the Arab and Balkan world have been, on the whole, kept tightly segregated from each other. Consequently, the four panels of the workshop are centered around key approaches that would benefit from being in dialogue. By doing so, they will allow leading scholars in the field to appraise the current state of research across national boundaries and academic disciplines and to bring forth new conversations and inter-regional dialogue about improving our approaches in the future development of the field. These interactions will help stimulate and guide future research efforts by delineating critical paths for subsequent research. The presentations will address key aspects such as:

• The development of scholarship in women’s and gender studies over the past decade, and the future directions the field might take.

• The comparative state of the field of women’s and gender studies in Turkey and its neighboring countries.

• The evolving position of women and gender in the contemporary societies of the region.

• Policy changes, both past and present, that have shaped the status quo of women and gender.

The conceptual framework of the event and its significance:

​This workshop will be groundbreaking in allowing scholars working on women’s and gender studies in the Ottoman world and modern Turkey to come together to discuss the state of the field. Despite the fact that many talented scholars work on issues related to women’s studies, gender and sexuality across the former Ottoman provinces (primarily Lebanon, Egypt, and the Balkans) as well as modern Turkey, there has rarely been academic platforms enabling scholars to focus specifically on their shared area(s) of research.  Resulting from a severe lack of communication among scholars working on these topics the field has therefore become compartmentalized and the current discourses remain fragmented. By convening a small-scale, highly focused event with internationally renowned speakers, this workshop seeks to bridge the communication gap and inspire new academic approaches among scholars of different nationalities and from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. The event is framed around three main academic disciplines that have informed women’s and gender studies: the humanities, the social sciences, and law.  By examining the most recent developments in the state of the field, each panel will contribute to a richer, more complex understanding of the field of women’s and gender studies in modern Turkey and its neighboring countries, while putting experts from each area into conversation with each other. In doing so, the workshop hopes to foster solidarities that connect common struggles beyond fixed geographic borders and academic disciplines.

Additionally, this workshop will provide a platform to discuss how to compensate for the lack of an institutional infrastructure for women’s and gender studies in and around Turkey. Currently, only few major universities have established separate women’s and gender studies departments to facilitate research in this field. Instead of inaugurating a separate field of study, numerous universities have opened up centers for women’s studies by offering certificate programs for students in other academic disciplines. Women’s and gender history have only recently been recognized as a thematic subfield within history departments. Therefore, women’s and gender studies frequently lack the institutional support to tackle large-scale research questions. Hence, the workshop will conclude by discussing how to best use existing resources, such as collaboration among research centers, activist organizations, and other institutions more effectively as an attempt to facilitate future growth and forms of cooperation in the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Four roundtable panels:

1. Mapping the Field: Literary Approaches to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Turkey and the Near East.

2. Mapping the Field: Historicizing Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Turkey and the Near East.

3. Mapping the Field: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies on the Region.

4. New Directions: The Academy, Solidarity, and Public Outreach.

https://www.mappinggenderneareast.org/

To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 30 November 2020 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

Every year, in July, thousands of Alevi pilgrims visit Tekke, a small town tucked away in lush agricultural lands about 130 kilometers inland from Antalya. The name of the village points to its major raison d’être, namely the presence of a tekke: that is, a lodge complex that includes the shrine of a Sufi saint. This shrine-village is dedicated to the fourteenth-century pir, or spiritual leader, Abdal Musa. In this presentation, Christiane Gruber will examine the shrine complex of Abdal Musa in a holistic manner, taking into account the architectonic spaces at the site, the icons that appear within the saint’s tomb, and the votive practices occurring, above all, at the trees and rocks located in the sacred complex. Along with a formal and visual analysis of buildings, images, and objects, information gleaned from textual sources as well as ethnographic research allow for a textured approach to the subject at hand. This interdisciplinary methodology is finessed through some insights drawn from eco-critical theory in order to shed new light on Alevi pilgrims’ interactions with nature, hence recentering the earthly environment within a larger Muslim religious landscape of belief and practice.

Christiane Gruber is Chair and Professor of Islamic art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her scholarly work explores figural representation, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and ascension texts and images in Islamic traditions, about which she has written three books and edited half a dozen volumes. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts, codicology, and paleography as well as modern and contemporary visual and material culture. Her most recent publications include her single authored book The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images and her edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World, both published in 2019.

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 16 November 2020 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Khanly in word, sultanic in image: exchanges between 16th-century Transoxiana and Anatolia evidenced in the Shībānī-nāma of Muhammad Sālih

The focus of the lecture is on a singular copy of the Shībānī-nāma manuscript located in Vienna. It was composed in Turkish by the poet Muhammad Sālih when he served the Abū’l-Khairid Shībānids (Uzbeks) after the troops of Muhammad Shībānī Khan took over Transoxiana (Central Asia) in 1500. Completed in autumn 1510, the manuscript’s text praises Shībānī as a dynastic founder and extols his victories and conquests. But the leader was killed a few months later and the work remained unfinished. At a later point it left the region, with its transit evidenced by completed illustrations. Accepted to be products of the Ottoman sphere based on parallels to other illustrated historical works from the Istanbul workshops, their provenance provide insight into political and artistic exchanges between Ottomans and Uzbeks that are not fully known but which can be gleaned from the materiality of this very manuscript. It seems plausible that they were added during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent based on his correspondence and rapport with contemporary Abū’l-Khairid rulers in Bukhara and Samarqand, but the intended recipient and rationale for the finished product remain elusive.

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with a speciality in Arabic and Islamic civilizations (2009). She also holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (2012) and a second MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2015), where she studied book arts of the Mongol through Safavid periods.

She is currently a PhD candidate affiliated with Leiden University working on a dissertation related to Abū’l-Khairid productions of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma and related epics from 16^th to 17^th-century Central Asia.  She has received numerous research awards to fund her studies, and has several forthcoming publications on illustrated manuscripts from Central Asia and depictions of Central Asians by Safavid artists in the early modern period.

 

To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 2 November 2020 (Monday) at the latest.
For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

 

Although historiography in Middle Eastern women’s history has developed rapidly in the last decades, scholarship on the comparative history of feminism in the Middle East has been severely limited. Just as important, there is a century-long lacuna in the history of the women’s movements in Turkey, with relatively few studies examining the period 1880-1980. Egypt and the Ottoman center (later Turkey) are well suited for a comparative examination of evolving feminist discourses, as their two centers of cultural production, Cairo and Istanbul, maintained a constant and mutual flow of local interaction during the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries.

This talk offers a comparative analysis of the patterns and distinct phases in which Egyptian and Turkish feminists engaged with both religious and secular reform traditions during this period. It argues that in societies with a strong heritage of secular liberal reform, wherein progressive tradition is engineered by intellectuals and cadres of officials, such as in the Ottoman center and in the Turkish Republic, feminism becomes a state-centric political project and an intellectual enterprise in which more conservative manifestations of feminism are side-lined for the sake of a swift rate of progress. It will be argued that in societies with a strong heritage of Islamically grounded modernization and social advances, such as in Egypt, on the other hand, feminism is rooted in, nourished by, and highly responsive to social, cultural, and religious norms, fostering social mobilization at a broader stratum, yet at a much slower, or more gradual, rate of progress.

Dr. Gülşah Torunoğlu is a research fellow at the Swedish Research Institute (SRII) and a visiting scholar at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, where she is revising her dissertation to publish as a monograph. She holds a PhD in History from Ohio State University (2019) specializing in comparative women’s history in the Middle East. Previously, she held visiting fellow positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the American University in Cairo, and at Princeton University. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED). Over this past summer she also taught a course on “Women and Gender in Literature” at Koç University.

Based on two years of archival research in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, Dr. Torunoğlu’s current book project, A Comparative History of Feminism in Egypt and Turkey, 1880-1935: Dialogue and Difference, establishes a dialogue between Turkish and Egyptian feminisms, compares nationalist versus Islamic trends among them, and takes stock of their interactions with and resistances to western feminisms. By bringing the evolution of the feminist discourse in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire into conversation with the secular and religious reform traditions in both countries in a comparative perspective, her work seeks to encourage a broader and more in-depth understanding of feminism in the Middle East, stripped from the dominant, nationalist narrative of its evolution.
Together with Prof. Hülya Adak (SU Gender) and Dr. Richard Wittmann (Orient-Institut Istanbul) Dr. Torunoğlu will be hosting a two-day online workshop next month titled “Mapping Gender in the Near East: What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” (December 9-10, 2020).

 

ÖNEMLİ HATIRLATMA: Bu çevrimiçi seminere katılmak için kayıt yapmak mecburidir. Lütfen, adınızı ve kurumunuzu içeren bir e-postayı events@oiist.net adresine 12 Ekim 2020 (Pazartesi) tarihine kadar yollayınız.

 

Harun Korkmaz (İstanbul Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü), Güfte Mecmualarının Osmanlı Tarihyazımına Katkısı

 

‘Güfte Mecmuası’ makam, usûl, beste türü, bestekâr ismi gibi atıflardan birini yahut birkaçını kullanmak suretiyle, mündericâtındaki şiirlerin bestelendiğini gösteren şahsî derlemelerdir. Güfte mecmuaları, mecmuayı toplayan kişinin, melodisini hafızasında sakladığı eserleri, yeri geldiği zaman ona başvurarak okumasını temin eder.

Güfte mecmualarının Osmanlı musiki tarihi bakımından en büyük önemi, meşk yöntemiyle üstaddan çırağa aktarılagelmiş ve 19. ile 20. yüzyıllarda notaya alınmış olan sözlü musiki eserlerinin, hangi bestekârlar tarafından bestelendiğini ortaya koymasıdır. Çoğunlukla bu bilgiler de eserle beraber aktarılsa da, kimi zaman karışıklıklar olmuş, eserlerin kimin bestesi olduğu hususunda yanlış bilgiler verilebilmiştir. Bu yanlışlıkları, çoğu kere, eserin bestelendiği devre ait diğer mecmualardaki bilgilerle mukayese ederek düzeltmek mümkündür.

Güfte mecmualarında, bugün bestesi kayıp olan binlerce eserin güftesiyle beraber, isimleri günümüzde tamamen unutulmuş olan yüzlerce bestekârın ismine rastlanabilir. Bu isimlerin incelemesi musiki tarihinin aydınlatılabilmesine hizmet eder. Güfte mecmuaları, arşiv belgeleri ve biyografi kaynaklarıyla birlikte okundukça, bestekâr hayatları hakkındaki araştırmalar yeni bir cephe kazanmaktadır. Mecmualardaki makam ve usûl isimleri, hangi devirde hangi makam ve usûllerin daha yaygın olduğunu gösterir. Güfte mecmuaları aynı zamanda Türk Edebiyatı tarihinin de vazgeçilmez kaynaklarındandır. İçerdikleri kimi güfteler, hiçbir divanda, şiir mecmuasında bulunmayabilir. Bilhassa şarkı türünde bestelenmiş eserlerin güfteleri çoğu zaman sadece bu mecmualardan elde edilebilir.

Harun Korkmaz 2011’de İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Bölümü’nü bitirdi. 2014 yılında Osmanlı Müesseseleri ve Medeniyeti Tarihi Ana Bilim Dalı’nda Prof. Dr. Zeynep Tarım danışmanlığında yüksek lisansı tamamlayarak aynı ana bilim dalında doktoraya başladı. Güfte mecmuaları üzerine bir doktora tezi hazırlamaktadır. 2013 yılından beri İstanbul Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü’nde araştırma görevlisi olarak görev yapmaktadır. Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü’nde bulunan, Hüseyin Sadeddin Arel’e ait arşivin tasnif ve kataloglama çalışmalarını nihayete erdirmiştir. Musiki tarihi sahasında Murat Bardakçı’dan istifade etmiş, Leonidas Asteris’ten şan, M. Doğan Dikmen’den Klasik Türk Musikisi repertuvarı dersleri almıştır. İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi’ndeki Musiki Yazmalarının Kataloğu ve Mûsikînin Diyârbekri – Klasik Türk Musikisinde Diyarbekirli Bestekârlar isimli iki kitabı yayınlanmıştır.

Online Workshop

The Ingredients of Aşure

which will take place on 24 September 2020

17.00 – 19.30 (Istanbul time)

via Zoom

The workshop is part of a series of research meetings dedicated to Materialities of Everyday Religiosity, Past and Present. It aims to look closely at aşure, the sweet boiled grain soup, or pudding, which is ceremonially cooked and distributed in the month of Muharrem. The ingredients of aşure are amazingly numerous, and manifold and ambiguous religious connotations are connected to this dish, which seems to evade simple categorizations. It is both sweet and savoury; it is cooked, and distributed among neighbours, by religious and secular people of all kinds of urban and rural backgrounds. The variety of grains, pulses and dry fruit it is composed of are often commemorated as the food supplies on Noah’s ark; but this is only one of the numerous oral traditions related to the cooking of aşure. It is surprising that so far, neither anthropology of religion nor anthropology of food have thoroughly dealt with this ceremonial dish. We are therefore pleased that three experts on the topic have agreed to share and discuss a part of their work on the cultural history, ritual, and symbolism of aşure. Priscilla Mary Işın (Istanbul), an authority in the historical research of Ottman food and sweets will shed light on aşure in the 17^th century according to Evliya Çelebi. Anthropologist Dr. Marie Hélène Sauner (Idemec Aix-Marseille/Galatasaray University Istanbul) will present from her research on oral tradition related to colours and textures of aşure. Prof. em. Frances Trix (Indiana University, Bloomington), drawing on many decades of her ethnographic fieldwork among Albanian Bektaşis, will share some of her memories of Bektaşi aşure ceremonies in Michigan. Anthropologist of religion Dr. Esther Voswinckel Filiz (Orient-Institut Istanbul) will shed light on the ritual importance of aşure cooking and distribution at some of Istanbul’s historical Sufi tekkes.

In order to register for the event and in order to receive the zoom admission code, please write an email to voswinckel@oiist.org no later than Tuesday, 22 September.

Together with my colleagues in the research field History of Religions of Anatolia I am looking forward to welcoming you at our online event. Esther Voswinckel Filiz

Click for programm

To attend this online workshop, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 31 August 2020 (Monday) at the latest. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the workshop starts.

 

Sounds are an essential medium of representation of power. Especially on the occasion of festive events they were effectively used in the form of music, noises and performative speech acts. However, this was not done in isolation from other media. Rule was to be experienced as all-encompassing, in order to amaze and awe the court, the subjects as well as competing and “friendly” courts, and to present the ruler’s government, person and environment as ideal instances of power.

The workshop “Sonic Rituals: Ottoman, Habsburg & Burgundian Festivities  (15th – 17th Centuries) From an Intermedial Perspective”, which will be organized on 4th and 5th September 2020 by the SNF project “The Sound of Power: Sounding as Intermedial Category of 15th to 17th Century Court Festivity Rituals in an Intercultural Perspective” (University Bern) together with the Orient-Institut Istanbul, will focus specifically on the intermedial interplay of power and sound in rituals in the context of the Ottoman Sultans and the courts of Habsburg-Burgundy. Lecturers from Istanbul, Ankara, Bern, Dijon, Vienna and Boston will approach the topic from different disciplinary and time perspectives.

The workshop is organized as a video conference and thus offers the possibility to get into conversation with each other despite different locations. Interested persons who would like to join the workshop as listeners and discussants are welcome.

Click here for Program

IMPORTANT NOTE: To attend this livestream lecture, prior registration is necessary: please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to events@oiist.net by 18 May 2020 (Monday) at the latest.

 

“Out with every theory of human behavior (…) who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” In a now (in)famous article, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, made a claim that the data aggregated by technology companies is rendering scientific methods obsolete. Anderson argued that there is no need for sampling-based methodologies in an age wherein everything is recorded and everything leaves a digital trace. Whilst Anderson’s claims about the end of scientific method are at best ludicrous, he is right in pointing out that the “data deluge” has destabilized the epistemological claims of social science. To put it in another way, how can social science remain relevant in the age of data science? One way would be by harnessing the potential offered by computational social science, the fusion social science rigour with computer science techniques.

Computational social science focuses on developing methodologies to collect and analyse large quantities of data gleaned from social media and the Internet. Although such methods are interdisciplinary and diverse, they all tend to share three common features: automated or semi-automated collection of datasets from digital environments, large datasets and the usage of a range of different techniques drawn from computer science to model or analyse the results. Using examples from ongoing or published research, this lecture introduces three different categories of data (semantic, sentiment and relational) available online, and showcases some of methodological approaches to analyse and model such datasets. In doing so, the talk invites participants to critically engage with both the challenges and opportunities of computational methodologies.

Dr. Ivo Furman is assistant professor and graduate program director at Istanbul Bilgi University’s department of Media. He completed his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015. His research has been supported by numerous institutions including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education, Turkish Science and Technology Foundation (TUBITAK) and Stiftung Mercator. His research interests include computational social science methods, critical data studies and digital sociology. Featured on Policy & the Internet, his most recent publication, “End of an Habermassian Ideal? Political Communication on Twitter during the Night of the 2017 Turkish Constitutional Referendum”, uses network analysis to explore political polarization on social media. He is also co-editor of the upcoming volume Politics of Culture in New Turkey (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

 

There has been widespread media coverage of what is often referred to as the “autism epidemic” around the world. Today autism remains a field of contention. This presentation builds on fieldwork conducted in Turkey to analyze the changing politics of childhood through a study of autism. Through observations and interviews with parents and professionals, I show that middle class parents have formed alliances with Western-educated experts to “disassemble” the autism spectrum and opt out of the world of autism altogether. I will discuss in detail the contestation over biomedical treatments, the changing nature of special education and “valorization of childhood” in an environment increasingly governed by the principles of neoliberalism. In doing so, the presentation intends to bring a relational understanding to how disease categories travel globally and how diseases are localized.

Dr. Emine Öncüler Yayalar teaches courses on Science, Technology and Society at the Faculty of Engineering of Bilkent University. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Boğaziçi University and M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from Columbia University in New York. She has previously published on sociology of knowledge, sociology of expertise and gender studies. Dr. Yayalar is the co-author of the book The Autism Matrix, which was awarded the Robert K. Merton book prize by the American Sociological Association. Her current research investigates social determinants of knowledge in medicine, science and technology.

Gelişme ve kalkınma hedefleriyle uyumlaştırılan nükleer enerji üretimi, negatif dışsallıkları bağlamında tartışmalı bir konudur. Dünya genelinde Çernobil Nükleer Felaketi ve ondan 25 yıl sonra meydana gelen Fukuşima Nükleer Felaketi nedeniyle nükleer enerjiden çıkış eğilimi oluşmuşsa da başta Türkiye olmak üzere bazı ülkeler ilk defa nükleer santral sahibi olmayı planlamaktadır. Bu çalışmayla nükleer zincirin bir halkası olan nükleer enerjinin kapitalist sistemle tarihsel ilişkisi bağlamında göz ardı edilen ekolojik ve toplumsal sağlık riskleri, 2011 yılından bugüne devam etmekte olan Fukuşima Nükleer Felaketi’nin etkilerine dair saha araştırmalarından örneklerle açıklanmaya çalışılacaktır. Sunum kapsamında nükleer enerjinin içinde yer aldığı tüm bir nükleer zincirin kadınlar ve çocuklardan dezavantajlı gruplar üretmesi, sağlıklı yaşam hakkının engellenmesine yönelik yanlış bilginin dolaşıma sokulması, nükleer süreçlere dair bilgi edinmede şeffaflığın mümkün olmaması gibi soru ve sorunlar tartışılacak, nükleer enerji karbon salmayan bir enerji midir? İklim krizi koşullarında nükleer enerjiyle sağlıklı bir gelecek tahayyülü mümkün müdür? gibi sorulara da cevap aranacaktır.

Pınar Demircan Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Ana bilim dalında doktor adayı. Başlıca ilgi alanları ekolojik riskler, toplum-bilim-teknoloji çalışmaları, risk sosyolojisi, politik ekoloji ve toplumsal hareketler. Aynı zamanda araştırmacı gazeteci ve nükleer karşıtı aktivist olarak 2014 yılı itibariyle nükleer enerji konusunda bilgi portalı Nükleersiz.org’un koordinatörü. Nükleer süreçlerle ilgili çalışmaya başlamasında Fukuşima Nükleer Felaketi ve ardından Türkiye’de gerçekleştirilmek istenen nükleer santral projeleri belirleyici oldu. Japonca’dan tercümelerle nükleer felaketin fikri takibini yaparken Fukuşima tanıklıklarının toplumsal paylaşımında, Japonya’daki sivil toplum örgütlerinin davetiyle Fukuşima sonrası (Post-Fukuşima) toplum temalı çeşitli projelerde çalıştı. En son Takagi Vakfı’nın desteğiyle Fukuşima ve Tokyo’da gerçekleştirdiği kendi araştırmasını STS TURKEY 2019 Kongresi’nde sundu.

Armin Grunwald, full professor of Philosophy of Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is Director of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at KIT and Director of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag. His research interests include technology assessment, ethics of philosophy, digital transformation of society, theory of sustainable development, and the epistemology of inter- and transdisciplinary research. In his professional work, he is member of several advisory commissions and committees in various fields of technological progress. More about Armin Grunwald can be found here (www.itas.kit.edu/english/staff_grunwald_armin.php)

Erkan Erdil studied Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1990 and in 2001 his Ph.D. from University of Maastricht. Since 1992 is working at METU, where between 2002–2017 he acted as Director of the Science and Technology Policies Research Center (METU-TEKPOL). He also served as board member of GLOBELICS (The Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems) and ISS (International Schumpeter Society). http://stps.metu.edu.tr/sites/stps.metu.edu.tr/files/resume_Erdil_1.pdf

Ömer İlhan studied Economics (B. Sc., 2012) and Science and Technology Policy Studies (M. Sc., 2019) at METU. Since June 2014 he is working at the Department of Chemical Products in the Directorate General of Export of the Ministry of Trade. His main areas of academic interest are international trade, international business, economics of technology and public policy.

This talk will be about ongoing transformations in the sacred musical repertoires practiced by ḥazzanim (synagogue cantors) and their synagogue congregations in Istanbul’s contemporary Jewish community. Dr. Alpar argues that clergy and laypeople alike negotiate their religious identities as Turkish Jews in the musical choices they make. While many try to maintain the community’s local music tradition, rooted in makam—the Ottoman Turkish melodic system—others attempt to broaden their repertoire with musics from Israel, the United States, and Ḥabad Hasidic Judaism. He will examine adjustments made to the musical components of ritual as responses to decades of Jewish religious life as experienced under the authority of the secular Turkish state and to the resurgence of religious observance within certain segments of the Jewish community. Newly religious and spiritually searching Jews now have a conflicted relationship with their community’s historic, sacred musical practices, appreciating their cultural significance but questioning their relevance and efficacy. He asserts that ḥazzanim and community members articulate ambivalent and changing attitudes about their Jewish identities, memory, and the value of local tradition in their diverse approaches to making sacred music. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul’s Jewish community, Dr. Alpar’s talk investigates the tension between their loyalty to tradition and the freedom and fear of being liberated from it.

Dr. Joseph M. Alpar is a scholar, performer, and educator whose research centers on musical and religious practices in Turkey and former Ottoman territories. He is a visiting faculty member in ethnomusicology and music history at Bennington College for the 2019-2020 academic year. Alpar earned his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York in June 2019, having completed a dissertation titled, “Music and Jewish Practice in Contemporary Istanbul: Preserving Heritage, Bending Tradition.” His research has been supported by fellowships from The American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Alpar is an accomplished vocalist and multi-instrumentalist of Turkish, Greek, and Sephardic music, playing santouri, piano, darbuka, and frame drums. He is the director of David’s Harp, an acclaimed Philadelphia-based music ensemble specializing in Sephardic Jewish music. He has taught previously in the music departments of Swarthmore College, Temple University, and CUNY, Hunter College.

İçeriden Sesler, Sessizlikler: Tımarhanede Sanat ve Edebiyat (Fatih Artvinli): Türkiye’de “delilik çalışmaları” alanına ilgi son yıllarda giderek artmaya başlamıştır. Tıp tarihi ve psikiyatri tarihi alanında daha çok temel aktörler ve kurumların tarihine yoğunlaşılırken, bu kurumlarda bizzat hastalar tarafından üretilen eserler, edebiyat ve sanat ürünlerine yansıyan sesler ve sessizlikler henüz yeterince işitilmemiştir. Bu sunumda, Toptaşı Bimarhanesi, La Paix ve Bakırköy Akıl Hastanesi’nin ünlü, ünsüz sakinlerinden yola çıkarak ortaya konulan ürünlerin bize kurumlar, tımarhanede yaşam ve sanat hakkında neler söylediği üzerinde durulacaktır.
Fatih Artvinli (Doç. Dr.) artvin doğumlu. Yusufeli Sağlık Meslek Lisesi, Toplum Sağlığı Bölümü’nden mezun oldu. Lisans eğitimini, Marmara Üniversitesi Siyaset Bilimi ve Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü’nde, yüksek lisansını Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Siyaset Bilimi Bölümü’nde, doktora çalışmasını ise aynı üniversitenin Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılâp Tarihi Bölümü’nde tamamladı. Doktora sonrası araştırmasını Harvard Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi’nde yaptı. Halen Acıbadem Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Tıp Tarihi ve Etik Anabilim Dalı’nda öğretim üyesidir. Fatih Artvinli’nin History of Psychiatry, History of Neurosciences, Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları gibi dergilerde yayımlanan makalelerinin yanı sıra, yayımlanmış iki kitabı bulunmaktadır: Seraba Harcanmış Bir Ömür: Osman Bölükbaşı (Kitap Yayınevi, 2007) Delilik, Siyaset ve Toplum: Toptaşı Bimarhanesi (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2013).

Oksitosin: Bir Yeni Tıp ve Sanat Yolculuğu (Elif Vatanoğlu Lutz): Koç Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi öğretim üyesi Doç. Dr. Elif Vatanoğlu tarafından kurulan Oksitosin Tıp ve Sanat Platformu çalışmalarına başlamıştır. Oksitosin Tıp ve Sanat Platformu, Tıpta İnsan Bilimleri alanı içinde şekillendirdiği detaylı projelerini sağlık çalışanları ,tıp öğrencileri, sosyal bilimciler ve sanat dünyası ile paylaşmaya hazırdır. Oksitosin Tıp ve Sanat Platformu’nun aktiviteleri; sanat alanında işleri tıbba değen sanatçılarla ortk projeler üretmek, tıp ve sağlık ile ilgili eğitim öğretim yapan fakültelere yönelik yenilikçi müfredat önerileri geliştirmek, sağlık çalışanlarının dayanıklılığının ve sağlığını artırmak, hastalara yönelik iyilşetirici çalışmalar ve toplumu bilinçlendirmek olmak üzere beş temel alanda faaliyet göstermektedir. Özellikle hastalar yönelik projeleri ‘sanat iyileştirir’ başlığı altında yapılandırılmaktadır. Bu konuşma çerçevesinde Oksitosin Tıp ve Sant Platformu’nun kuruluş öyküsünün yanısıra halihazırda devam eden projeleri ve geleceğe yönelik hedefleri konusunda genel bir çerçeve çizilecektir.
Elif Vatanoğlu Lutz (Doç. Dr.) 1999 yılında İstanbul Üniversitesi Cerrahpaşa Tıp Fakültesi’nden mezun oldu. 2007 yılında İstanbul Üniversitesi Cerrahpaşa Tıp Fakültesi’nde Tıp Tarihi ve Etik alanındaki doktorasını tamamladı. 2008-2014 yılları arasında Yeditepe Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi’nde, 2014-2020 arasında Koç Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi’nde öğretim üyesi olarak görev yaptı. 2008-2011 yılları arasında Kadir Has Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi’nde Sağlık Hukuku doktora programında ders verdi. Bütün sosyal bilim disiplinlerinin tıp ile ilişkisine duyduğu ilgi neticesinde ‘tıpta insan bilimleri’ alanında, özellikle ‘tıp ve sanat’ disiplini ile ilgili verdiği birçok farklı başlıkta dersler ve araştırmalarından sonra 2019 yılında Oksitosin Tıp ve Sanat Platformu’nu kurdu.

Tıbbın Epistemik Serüveni: Bir Biyopolitik Fenomenoloji Denemesi (Özen B. Demir): Tıbbın, bütün “insancıl” ve inter-disipliner vurgulara inat, bir tür kendiliğinden ideoloji şeklinde varlığını sürdüren fizikalizmi, mekanik ve şabloncu paradigması esasında bir tür “ucube fabrikası” olarak çalışır. Tıbbın hegemonik bilim rejimi bünyesindeki tevellüdü modernite öncesine, antikiteye dek uzatılabilir. Bu koordinattaki elzem kavram ise “isonomia”dır. İsonomia ideali, bir bakıma fizyokratik bir rejim olarak, homeostatik [denge kurucu] şiddeti zorunlu kılar ve onu meşruiyet zeminine taşıyarak “ihlâl”in edimselliğini bertaraf eder. Homeostatik manevralar, Hippokrates tıbbında evvelâ “rejim”in optimize edilmesi aracılığıyla sağlanıyordu; rejim, Foucaultcu bir okumayla, yapısal şiddetin devreye girdiği uzama tekabül ediyordu. Günümüzde ise yeni suretlerde, sımsıkı kamufle edilmiş rafine yordamlarla hükmünü icra eder. “Terapi” söyleminin isonomist ve işlevselci muğlâklığında yaşayıp gider. Bir dispozitif olarak işleme sokulur ve o arada piyasa dinamikleriyle de iç içe girer. Dahası, aynı kavramın, günümüze uzanan bir tür epistemolojik sürekliliği barındırdığı da vâkidir. Bu da kendisini baştanbaşa bir risk [yönetimi] anlatısıyla çerçevelenmiş çağdaş somatik ve kronik-dejeneratif hastalıklara ilişkin medikal dağarda açığa vurmaktadır. Yapılması gereken, söz konusu riskli öznelliklerin “biyopolitik fenomenolojisi”ne soyunmaktır.
Dr. Özen B. Demir Semsûr [Adıyaman] doğumlu. İlköğrenimini TED Ankara Koleji’nde, ortaöğrenimini Ankara Gazi Anadolu Lisesi’nde, yükseköğrenimini Gazi Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi’nde tamamladı. Muhtelif metinleri Kaos GL, Birikim, Kampfplatz, Doğu Batı, Demokratik Modernite, Mesele, Gaia, Ayrıntı Dergi, Alternatif Eğitim, Notlar, Edebiyatta Üç Nokta, Bilim ve Gelecek, İktisat ve Toplum gibi platformlarda yayınlandı. Dijital ortamda Georges Canguilhem çevirdi. Daha önce neşredilmiş olan Hekim ve Heybesi: Tıp, Bilim, İdeoloji [NotaBene, 2017] ile Beden, Tıp ve Felsefe [Adem Yıldırım ile; NotaBene, 2018] başlıklı iki kitabın yanısıra, geçtiğimiz aylarda yayınlanan Biyopolitika ve Queer: AIDS Krizi, Bağışıklık ve Ötesi’nin [Nika, 2019] yazarıdır.

‘Beni Robot Ameliyat Etsin İstiyorum’: Cerrah, Teknoloji ve Hasta (Gülşah Başkavak): Cerrahın elleri mi yoksa da Vinci robotunun kolları mı? Hastaların ameliyat tercihlerinin de olabileceği 2000’lerden önce düşünülemezdi. Cerrahide yoğun teknoloji kullanımının hastalarca kabul gördüğü ve oldukça talep edildiği gözleminden hareketle, teknolojinin sağlık alanında tüketim kültürünün yaygınlaşmasında rol oynadığı öne sürülebilir. Özellikle, üroloji, genel cerrahi ve kadın hastalıkları ve doğum gibi bazı cerrahi branşlarda hem laparoskopik (kapalı) ameliyat tekniklerinin hem de robotik cerrahinin kullanımı oldukça yaygınlaşmıştır. Hastalar özellikle robotik cerrahiye büyük ilgi göstermektedirler. Hastaların teknolojiye yaklaşım ve talebinin, hasta-cerrah ilişkisinde hastalar lehine bir güçlenme anlamına gelip gelmediği, cerrahların otorite ve otonomisinde bir zayıflamaya yol açıp açmadığı gibi sorular bu bağlamda öne çıkmaktadır. Bu konuşmadaki amacım, söz konusu dönüşümlerin cerrahide yoğun teknoloji kullanımı ve teknoloji talebine yansımasını ve dolayısıyla cerrah-hasta ilişkisinin nasıl etkilediğini, cerrahlık mesleğinin dönüşümüne dair gerçekleştirdiğim niteliksel bir saha araştırmasının bulguları ve uzun saatler süren ameliyathane gözlemleri üzerinden paylaşmaktır.
Dr. Gülşah Başkavak, Orient-Institut Istanbul’da İnsan, Tıp ve Toplum alanında, araştırmacı olarak çalışmaktadır. Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (ODTÜ), Sosyoloji bölümünden doktora derecesini aldı. Tez araştırması sırasında hastane, klinik ve ameliyathanelerde niteliksel ve etnografik araştırmalar gerçekleştirdi. Başkavak’ın akademik ilgi alanları, tıp ve sağlık sosyolojisi, tıp-teknoloji ilişkisi, yeni cerrahi teknolojileri ve hastalar, dijital sağlık, sağlık politikaları, bilim ve teknoloji çalışmaları, meslekler ve profesyoneller, zanaat ve zanaatkarlık konularında odaklanmaktadır.

During this encounter, we will hear about the research-practice of Bodiless Heads that Shahrzad Irannejad and Setareh Fatehi developed in 2017, which continues to inspire their current individual works and research. Bodiless Heads is a research on traditions of [non-]depictions of the body in the Islamicate world; it is a metaphor, a hypothesis, an imaginary state that relates to the evasive, multi-layered cultures of courtesy evolved over time, particularly where Sharzad and Setareh come from. In 4 chapters, they have looked at the impact of that certain [non-]visualization of body-image on the development of a non-Eurocentric concept of the Body and its relation to Health, Performativity, Mobility, and Knowledge Transfer. Their research around the idea of Bodilessness and the borders of body perception extended to further questions around body-time-image and formed the basis of Setareh’s practice of online dancing that underlies her current research swim\او. In this research, she explores, among other issues, such themes as ethics of virtual presence, enhancement, and geopolitics. Our encounter in this episode of the lecture series “Human, Medicine and Society” will explore the history of their dialogue, its current state and its possible implications.

Shahrzad Irannejad is a researcher in history of humoral medicine in the Islamicate world. Her research follows two broad paths: first, humoral medicine in Iran in relation to its cultural context; and second, the history of humoral medicine in the Islamicate world in relation to its Hellenic roots. She is currently working on her PhD thesis entitled “Localization of the Avicennean inner senses in a Hippocratic body”, in which she deals with the Hellenic ideas regarding mental faculties and their embodiment, which were transferred to the medieval Islamicate world as manifested in the works of Avicenna. Her current research on the concepts of the Inner Senses is partly fueled by her fascination with the mind-body problem.

Setareh Fatehi is a choreographer based in Tehran and Amsterdam. Her research-based practice encompasses lenses, bodies, wifi connections, screens and projections. She is embracing the medium of live video as a part of her presence. In her work she addresses the fluidity of the definition of her body and opens up the space for acknowledging the effect that other forms of presence (their gaze and their thoughts) could have on the ways she engages with her own body.

 

 

 

According to global data, intimate partner violence and its corresponding impact threaten the lives of almost 35% of women at some point in their life. The aim of this research was to explore the effects of intimate partner sexual violence on women’s sense of self-efficacy. The participants, 10 women with experiences of intimate partner sexual violence participated in in-depth interview and a thematic analysis method has employed to analyse the data. Two main themes were drawn from the data, including Exposure and Empowerment. Exposure refers to the type of violence and its effects; and Empowerment refers to factors women considered as giving them the courage to seek help from others. It is concluded that Iranian women are not passive when exposed to intimate partner sexual violence, and social support, mainly from family and friends, was a pathway to feelings of empowerment; without this support, women’s emotional health is put in jeopardy.

Dr. Azam Naghavi is assistant professor in the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Isfahan, Iran. She has studied PhD at Monash University, Australia and during her PhD she has worked about mental health issues of Iranian immigrant women in Australia. Since 2014 she is focusing on empowerment concept among people with disability, immigrants and women. Moreover, empowering factors after traumatic events and post-traumatic growth are two main topics she is working on at the moment. She has been involved in two DAAD projects and in one Erasmus program in the last two years.

 

 

Christoph Herzog is professor of Turcology at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He studied Middle Eastern and modern European history in Freiburg, Germany and in Istanbul. He works on late Ottoman history and modern Turkish historiography.

Mashrutiyyat and Modernity. A Historiographical Predicament: The constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran at the beginning of the 20th century have each for itself received considerable academic attention. In 2011 Nader Sohrabi has published a study that took things to a new level by a comparative perspective on the two revolutions and a view to their global context (Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran). In the same year Thomas Bauer has published his much-lauded work on Islam as a culture of ambiguity (The Culture of Ambiguity – An Alternative History of Islam / original title: Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des Islams).
Both books offer partly complementary and partly conflicting perspectives on modernity. The paper will confront these two perspectives in a critical reading and explore the meta-historical environment in which academic texts offering explanations of modernity are bound to operate.

 

 

Ancient DNA (Füsun Özer): Ancient DNA (aDNA) research focuses on the analyses of degraded DNA fragments extracted from archaeological remains such as bones, teeth and hair. These DNA molecules are sequenced to obtain individuals’ genomes, which are analysed for inferring kinship, demographic history, biological adaptations, and genetic diseases. The earliest aDNA studies mostly focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mainly due to technical limitations. However, mtDNA only provides information about the maternal history. Another drawback has been the risk of contamination which prevents distinguishing whether molecules derived from an archaeological sample are authentic or contamination from modern DNA. Recent developments in laboratory protocols and advanced computational approaches have accelerated aDNA studies by the beginning of 2010s. Although, aDNA is very promising in understanding history of human, past populations and human genome evolution, it may pose unintentional ethical issues. This presentation will provide an insight into the history of ancient DNA technology, ethics and future promises.
Füsun Özer is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hacettepe University. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Illinois, at Chicago in 2010. After completion of her degree, she started working as a lecturer in METU-Northern Cyprus Campus. In 2011, she joined the Department of Biology in METU, Ankara as a research scientist where she spearheaded the establishment of the first dedicated ancient DNA laboratory in Turkey. Dr Özer recently joined the Department of Anthropology at Hacettepe University where she also established the Hacettepe University Molecular Anthropology and Genomics Laboratory for ancient DNA studies.

Opportunities for STS: Translating Responsible Personalized Medicine (Robin Ann Downey): In this presentation, I explore how Science and Technology Studies (STS) researchers can make contributions to personalized medicine developments. Medical research and genomics have deep-rooted associations with ethical issues related to consent and privacy. In the early period of the Human Genome Project, studies focused on ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) were funded alongside discovery science. Later on, experiments in integrated research created opportunities for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary efforts. In addition to a range of other experts, STS researchers contributed to this work. As the promise of personalized medicine was touted, funders turned towards so-called translational efforts, which prioritize commercial and practical applications. Responsible Innovation (RI) offers another funding opportunity for STS contributions and it is also aligned with practical dimensions. RI efforts in personalized medicine may include collaborating with relevant stakeholders on projects related to the collection and management of big data, including users in design considerations, integrating privacy by design measures, incorporating qualitative information such as patient narratives in personalized medicine tools and creating opportunities for flexible decision making.
Robin Downey is a Science Technology and Society Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering at Bilkent University. Her work has mainly focused on technological controversies, including a cross-cultural analysis of media representations of cloning and an examination of how stakeholders helped to shape stem cell research developments in Canada. She was the Genomics and Society Advisor for Genome BC where she helped to build interdisciplinary research teams. In this context, she contributed to work on integrated research and developed an interest in personalized medicine. Responsible Innovation is her current research interest.

 

 

 

In his lecture at the Orient-Institut Istanbul on 18 December 2019, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel from Zurich, Switzerland is going to deal with care robots as well as therapy and surgery robots. He will present well-known and less known examples and clarify the goals, tasks and characteristics of these service robots in the healthcare sector. Afterwards he will investigate current and future functions of care robots, including sexual assistance functions. Against this background, the lecture is going to consider both the perspective of information ethics and machine ethics. In the end, it should become clear which robot types and prototypes or products are available in healthcare, which purposes they fulfill, which functions they assume, how the healthcare system changes through their use and which implications and consequences this has for the individual and society.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel was born in 1968 in Ulm. He studied philosophy as well as information science at the University of Constance and wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of St. Gallen about anthropomorphic software agents. Bendel has been researching information ethics and machine ethics for years. He works as a professor at the School of Business (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland) in Basel, Olten and Brugg-Windisch. Since 1998 he has published over 300 articles, book chapters and books. In 2019, Bendel founded the platform robophilosophy.com in order to gain more attention for the research field of robot philosophy.

 

 

 

 

Learning and Innovation Skills for the Future (Diler Öner): The purpose of this talk is to examine the educational outcomes we should be focusing on for the future. Drawing the parallels between industrial revolutions and education in history, I will discuss the potential transformations in education in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I will draw attention to the importance of developing the 4Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity) for a healthy society in the future.

Diler Öner is the director of the Center for Educational Technology Research and Implementation and an associate professor at the Department of Computer Education and Educational Technology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She received her MSc and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her research focuses on designing, developing and implementing computer-based tools to support higher level thinking skills (both for students and teachers).

Maker & Social Innovation (Zeynep Karagöz): Robotel Türkiye is a nonprofit organization of volunteers and makers that provides custom made 3D printed mechanical hands to citizens who need a finger or a hand prosthetic device – especially children – for free. The main target group of Robotel Türkiye is children with finger or hand deformation. Most cases have limb developmental disorder due to Amniotic Band Syndrome (ABS). The purpose of the 3D hand is both to make their lives easier and also to make them feel special. In addition to organizing volunteers and helping cases, we collaborate with corporations and other civil organizations. Aiming to expand the project by sharing, touching as many lives and hearts as possible. In this lecture, I will show, how Robotel Türkiye maker could be understood as driver for social innovations. Hence, by pointing to the interdependence of Technology and Society, I would like to discuss that enabling technologies like 3D printers combined with notions of do-it-yourself and maker might contribute to a “healthy society”.

Graduated from MSÜ – Architecture; Zeynep Karagöz co-founded KOMA Architecture in 2001. In 2008 KOMA merged with 5 dakika and gave experience design services. With Robotel Türkiye, she started making 3D printed mechanical hands for children with hand deformation who don’t have access to prosthetics. The team became a part of the Maker Community in 2014. In 2017, Robotel became an NGO. Karagöz leads the project as the head of the organization and defines herself as a PRO-MAKER. She makes programs on 21.Century & technology skills with Maker Çocuk & Maker Atölye. She designs collaborative multidimensional & multidisciplinary projects. She also shares her expertise as a speaker, trainer & mentor.

 

 

 

 

PLEASE NOTE: Admission only after prior registration to event@sri.org.tr.

 

Through an analysis of two state-created and state-managed databases that assess the applicants’ eligibility, I will explore how the two fundamental components of biopolitics – ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ – are interlaced in Istanbul’s food banks. After a discussion of what food banks are and how they got to Istanbul, I will introduce the databases and how access to food banks are streamlined through them. Next, I will talk about mechanisms of data collection and management and elaborate on various resistance methods the applicants use to contest the information recorded in the databases. I will conclude by arguing that first the databases both accumulate, concentrate and disperse power, thus making those responsible for granting/denying access to food banks invisible; and in conjunction, second, the transfer of the sovereign’s right and ability of ‚letting die‘ to the market mechanisms has enabled the elimination of social, economic and/or political ‚undesirables‘.

 

Candan Turkkan is an assistant professor at Özyeğin University (Istanbul/TR) Department of Gastronomy and Culinary Arts. She works on questions concerning urban food politics, critiques of capitalism (via global food movements and sustainability discussions) and mentalities of government (particularly of contemporary forms of neoliberalism, biopolitics and necroeconomics). She holds a PhD degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in political science (political theory) and a certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

 

 

 

 

 

İstanbul’da Tasavvuf

 

Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı İstanbul Tarihi Türk Müziği Topluluğunun müdürü Ömer Tuğrul İnançer, 1946 yılında Bursa’da doğdu. İstanbul Üniversitesinin hukuk fakültesinden mezun oldu. Tasavvuf geleneği, müziği ve çeşitli sufi ritüelleri hakkında birçok makalenin ve kitabın yazarı İnançer, eserlerinde sadece yazılı kaynaklardan değil, bu geleneğin sözlü kaynaklarından da istifade etmiştir. Türkiye’de ve yurtdışında birçok merasim icra etmiş ve konuşmalar gerçekleştirmiştir.

Velud bir yazar ve konuşmacı olan İnançer, uzun yıllardır Konya’daki Şeb-i Arûs törenlerinde mesnevihan olarak yer almaktadır. Müzikten mimariye, tasavvuf kıyafetlerinden edebiyatına Osmanlı Tasavvuf kültürünün korunması ve araştırılmasına çok uzun yıllardan beri emek veren Ömer Tuğrul İnançer’in İstanbul tasavvuf tarihine dair konuşmasına sizleri bekliyoruz.

 

Please note that some speakers will present in English and others in Turkish. Interpretation will not be available. Admission to the symposium is free of charge, but advance registration is required:
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/symposia/decorated-papers-in-early-modern-islamic-manuscript-cultures.aspx

The Islamic Manuscript Association—in partnership with the Orient-Institut Istanbul, the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, and the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation—is pleased to announce that it will hold a one-day symposium entitled Decorated Papers in Early Modern Islamic Manuscript Cultures at the Orient-Institut Istanbul on Saturday, 23 November 2019.

The symposium will examine a diverse array of topics concerning the production, circulation, and utilization of coloured and decorated papers in early modern Islamic manuscript cultures in China, the Indian subcontinent, Greater Iran, Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. The ten speakers will present new research on transfer, imitation, and innovation, as well as the material applications and mobility of papers and their technologies. Their research will consider a wide range of manuscripts—including sacred texts, literature, poetry, artists‘ manuals, and anthologies and albums produced and consumed both by elites and commoners—and elucidate how various types of decorated papers shaped, or were shaped by, manuscript cultures both within and beyond the borders of the Islamic world and demonstrate how these technologies had a dramatic and transformative impact upon early modern societies across the globe.

Please note that some speakers will present in English and others in Turkish. Interpretation will not be available. Admission to the symposium is free of charge, but advance registration is required:
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/symposia/decorated-papers-in-early-modern-islamic-manuscript-cultures.aspx

For any queries regarding the symposium or the Association, please contact admin@islamicmanuscript.org.

 

 

Byzantine music: a traditional music expression with modern aspects.

 

In this lecture, Emmanouil Giannopoulos will present some basic features of Byzantine music, which has a huge repertory created by skillful composers during the last centuries. Additionally, there will be some specific references for the great impact this musical tradition has on other kinds of non-ecclesiastic compositions, especially in the 19th and 20th century.

Emmanouil Giannopoulos, assistant Professor at the School of Music Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, teaches Byzantine Music and Musicology in Greece and abroad, he has written many scientific books, articles, essays on Psaltic Art -its extremely rich handwritten tradition, history, hymnography, theoretical treatises- and papers on the work of famous musicians. He takes part in the prestigious International Musicological Congress and his papers are published in the Proceedings and on the web. He has also edited numerous important musical books and he has given many performances with his students᾿ choir. He is a protopsaltes (first chanter) in the famous Byzantine Church of the Saints Apostles in Thessaloniki. To see his entire scientific and artistic activities visit his personal website: http://users.auth.gr/mangian

 

Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Helmut Goerlich

Universität Leipzig

Secular Law and Freedom of Religion

Doç. Dr. Emir Kaya

Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi

Moderate Secularism vs. Moderate Islam:
A Human Rights Comparison

Orient-Institut Istanbul: 6 November 2019 – 18:00

Susam Sokak No:16 Kat:3 Daire: 7 Cihangir – İstanbul

 

Helmut Goerlich studied philosophy, history and law in Frankfurt/Main and Hamburg. After several research sojourns (University College, Cambridge; JF Kennedy School of Government; Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass.), he habilitated with a monograph entitled „Grundrechte als Verfahrensgarantien: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Grundgesetzes für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland“ [Fundamental rights as procedural safeguards]. From 1981 to 1991, he was a judge at the administrative tribunal. In 1992 he was appointed as chair of constitutional and administrative law, constitutional history, and state church law at the Law Faculty of the University of Leipzig. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Istanbul Kültür University, where he is teaching as a visiting professor.

 

Secular Law and Freedom of Religion

Secular law has existed since the Roman Republic and the fall of the kings of ancient Rome. After that transition, Roman law was enacted by the Senate and the people rather than on a religious basis. An ethical-religiously-based protection was only required for the stability of application of this law and its normative power.

Since that time the secularity of law has been used to hold all other justified law at a distance and to constitute a self-sustaining public order on the basis of secularity. Throughout the Middle Ages, this pattern was maintained in Europe through the creation of norm-controlled princely territories in defense against the canonical-religious, local or customary, and later also the feudal law. This pattern was leading all the way to democratic legislation.

Secular constitutions in written form stand at the end of this development, supplemented by an expansion of the legal status of subjects, citizens, and finally of the human as a development towards individual rights, which have secular character even where they guarantee freedom of religion.

Emir Kaya is Associate Professor of Public Law at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, and currently visiting researcher at the Chair of Law and Religions at the Catholic University of Louvain. Previously he worked as judge-rapporteur for the Constitutional Court of Turkey.  He is the author of “Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey: Law, Policy-Making and the Diyanet”, and “Hukuk Zihniyeti” [Legal Mentality]. Dr. Kaya holds a PhD in Law from SOAS, the University of London, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Philosophy from Indiana University-Bloomington.

Moderate Secularism vs. Moderate Islam: A Human Rights Comparison

Secularism is an outcome of emancipation movements and is associated with humans’ liberties and rights rather than duties. Religions, however, have traditionally adopted duty-oriented discourses. This disparity between secularism and religion makes human rights an innately secular concept, and consequently unneutral towards religions. This, I believe, is the heart of clashes between secularism and religions with respect to human rights. To overcome clashes, we need not only moderate religiosity but also moderate secularity. But what is moderate religiosity/secularity? I intend to answer this question by introducing a revised version of secularism that is truly neutral about religion and also agreeable from the perspective of religion, especially Islam in contemporary European context.

IN COOPERATION WITH THE HUNGARIAN CULTURAL CENTER IN ISTANBUL / İSTANBUL MACAR KÜLTÜR MERKEZİ:

A Lecture in the Series Jewels of Knowledge / İlmin Cevherleri

Since ancient times, Southeastern Europe has been a crossroads, where the great empires and religious and cultural currents of the Mediterranean world have met and interacted with each other and with rich indigenous traditions. The long history of cultural interactions has given this region a remarkable legacy, including a still thriving, 600-year-old Islamic tradition, a part of European heritage that deserves to be better known.

The Balkan wars of the 1990s were an attempt to erase this diversity. The conflict resulted in the deaths of 150,000 and the forced exile of millions of people, singled out for persecution, expulsion, and genocide because of their cultural and religious identity. The violence against people was accompanied by systematic attacks on their heritage: the targeted destruction of historic buildings, houses of worship, manuscript libraries, and archives. A Council of Europe report in 1993 termed it „a cultural catastrophe in the heart of Europe.“

Based on Mr. Riedlmayer’s fieldwork for the UN war crimes tribunal, his presentation outlines the history of this region’s diverse cultural heritage, as well as his findings concerning its fate in the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and efforts to bring to justice those criminally responsible for this destruction.

A native of Budapest, Hungary, since 1985 András Riedlmayer has directed the Documentation Centre for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library. He studied at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University, where he read Ottoman history and Near Eastern Studies. He has published widely in academic and professional journals and has served as president of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and as a member of the board of the Islamic Manuscript Association.

For the past 25 years, Mr. Riedlmayer has been documenting the destruction of libraries and other cultural heritage in the Balkan wars and in organizing postwar assistance to cultural institutions in the region. In 2002, he appeared as an expert witness on cultural destruction in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević at the UN war crimes tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague. Since then, he has testified in several other cases before the ICTY, including the trials of former Bosnian Serb leader Dr. Radovan Karadžić and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladić, and in the genocide case brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina against Serbia before the International Court of Justice. Between 2003 and 2007 he chaired the Middle East Librarians‘ Association’s Committee on Iraqi Libraries.

 

The treasury of the Studenica Monastery in southern Serbia preserves the only known Ottoman textile attributed to the fourteenth century, a massive silk hanging woven for Sultan Bayezid I. It was donated to the monastery in the very early 1400s by Bayezid’s widow, Mileva Olivera Lazarević (Despina Hatun). The textile’s two inscriptions—al-Sultan al-^calim al-^cādil and Sultan Bayezid Khan ^cazza nasruhu—suggest it was commissioned for the Sultan himself. This talk argues, however, that the manner in which the inscriptions relate to the textile as a whole is at odds with their ostensible message. Rather than a custom design, this silk was probably a rush-job from a workshop accustomed to making goods for a commercial market. This talk introduces the textile, which has received little scholarly attention to date, putting its main features in context of its production as well as discussing its place at Studenica. It also argues for the importance of looking beyond text and evaluating evidence found in objects themselves.

Prof. Amanda Phillips earned her DPhil in 2011 from the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford.

She joined the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in 2015, after finishing a Marie Curie-Gerda Henkel fellowship at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. Prior to that, she spent two years as a Max Planck-Kunsthistorisches Institut post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art.

Her research interests, and in turn her publications, focus on the economies of art and material culture in the early modern Islamic world. Amanda Phillips conducts research mainly on the decorative arts and most especially on silk textiles in Constantinople and the greater eastern Mediterranean. The topic itself encompasses Mediterranean trade, starting with the Renaissance aesthetic of the fifteenth century, and then stretches into the Indian Ocean while charting the fashion, taste, and materiality in the global eighteenth century. Among her publications are the monograph Everyday Luxuries: Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600-1800 in conjunction with the National Museums of Berlin (Berlin: National Museums and Verlag Kettler, 2016); “The Localisation of the Global: Ottoman Silk and Silk Weaving, 1600-1790,” in Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-modern World, eds Molà, Riello, and Schäfer, (Rochester, 2018).

Her second book Seachange: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, 1400-1800, is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

 

 

 

The German botanist Carl Haussknecht (1838–1903) travelled in 1865 and again in 1866–68 in the Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire and in Iran. His main aim was to collect different types of plants for Edmond Boissier’s six-volume encyclopaedia ‘Flora Orientalis’ (published between 1867 and 1888). However, his travel diaries (almost a thousand pages long) abound with all kinds of information. Apart from his main interest in botany, he recorded his observations on geology, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, foreign merchants and missionaries, local bureaucrats, social and economic conditions. Haussknecht’s diaries, which remained unpublished so far, are particularly rich in information on rural, particular mountainous, areas, as well as villages and small towns. Considering the period of his travels (the 1860s), his descriptions open a window into the Ottoman reform period (Tanzimat) and the reforms’ application in these remote rural areas. This paper focuses on his first journey and his descriptions of the northern and eastern parts of the Aleppo province, a region between the modern cities of Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraș and Șanlıurfa. It will focus on two aspects of the transition from the ancien régime to the ‘modern’ Tanzimat state: the assertion of state control against local self-administration, and economic relations between the towns and their rural hinterland, and analyze how the traveler Haussknecht perceived it.

 

Dr. Stefan Knost is working on the history of Ottoman Aleppo; he works as a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He also acted as a visiting professor at the same university’s Oriental Institute, as an associate researcher at the Orient-Institut Beirut, and was a research fellow at the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), Tokyo. His publications include Die Organisation des religiösen Raums in Aleppo. Die Rolle der islamischen religiösen Stiftungen (auqāf) in der Gesellschaft einer Provinzhauptstadt des Osmanischen Reiches an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2009).

 

IMPORTANT NOTE:
To attend the conference, PRE-REGISTRATION is MANDATORY: to register, would you please send an EMAIL BY 15 AUGUST 2019 to underthesamebanner@gmail.com specifying your full name (surname, first name) and if you would like to attend the program on Friday (6 September), on Saturday (7 September), or on both days. The talks on Sunday (8 September) form part of an internal workshop for the conference participants, which is not open to the public.

 

http://www.underthesamebanner.org/

I. Dünya Savaşı’nın sürdüğü günlerde Osmanlı-Alman ilişkileri kurulan ittifakla birlikte en yoğun dönemlerinden birini yaşamıştır. Savaşla birlikte ivmesi yükselen bu ilişkinin tanıklarından biri de sinematograf görüntüleridir. Aynı dönemde yapısal bir dönüşüme uğrayan sinema, devletlerarası kurulan bu ilişkinin görüntüler yoluyla geniş bir seyirci kitlesine ulaşmasını sağlayabilmiş, filmlerin propaganda gücü, devletler nezdinde halkların savaşa seferber edilmesinde önemli bir ajan haline gelebilmiştir. Sinemanın savaş siyasetinde nasıl araçsallaştırıldığı, savaşın hangi imgeler yoluyla sürdürüldüğü ve görüntülerin dolaşıma sokulduğu yapım, dağıtım ve seyir ağı bu sunumun odağında incelenecektir. Arşiv belgeleri ve dönem basınında yayınlanan ilan, haber ve yazılarla desteklenen konuşmada belgesel filmlerden kesitler sunulacak ve görüntüler tarihsel belleğin izleğinde sorunsallaştırılacaktır.

Dr. Oya Kasap Ortaklan, İstanbul Üniversitesi Alman Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü’nde lisans eğitimi aldı ve yüksek lisans çalışmalarını aynı bölümde gerçekleştirdi. Marmara Üniversitesi Sinema-TV Bölümü’nde erken dönem sinema tarihi üzerine yoğunlaştığı doktora araştırmalarını “Erken Sinemanın Aynasından Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ile Alman İmparatorluğu Arasındaki Sinemasal İlişkiler: Kültürel Alışveriş, İzlenimler, Etkileşimler (1895–1918)” adını taşıyan tez çalışmasıyla tamamladı. Sigmund Freud ve Béla Balázs’ın eserlerini Almanca’dan Türkçe’ye çevirdi. Farklı dergi ve kitaplarda makale ve yazıları yayınlandı. Halen Galatasaray Üniversitesi’nde doktor öğretim görevlisi olarak çalışmaktadır; akademik araştırmalarını ve yazın alanındaki çalışmalarını sürdürmektedir.

 

 

The survival of the Middle East, as we knew it, is in doubt. The future of Iraq, plagued by violence and war since 2003, has become unclear. Even greater uncertainty surrounds the continued existence of Syria, which has been a war zone since 2011. Libya and Yemen have ceased to be functioning states, now serving merely as cauldrons for confused conflicts. If one had to single out one key event that changed things fundamentally, it would be the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its ‘coalition of the willing’ in 2003. The Arab uprisings from 2010-1 may be seen as a reflection of these fundamental changes, rather than their primary cause. In this power vacuum, an unstable system structured around partial hegemons such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey has started to emerge. Recent events have been speeding up the historic retreat of the US from its role as the dominant global power – also in the Middle East. The United States might be able to insulate themselves from most of the consequences of the reordering of the Middle East. But for its closer neighbors –Europe included– this is not an option. The Middle East with which we were once so familiar has gone, never to return.

Prof. Dr. Maurus Reinkowski has chaired the Institute of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel, since 2010. After research positions held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem (1995-6) und at Orient-Institut Istanbul (1996-8), he has been teaching at Bamberg University (1998-2003), Munich’s Ludwigs-Maximilians University (2003-4), Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg (2004-2010) and Sabanci University, Istanbul (2015). He specializes in the history of the late Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, and the modern Middle East. He has published on the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nationalism and minorities in the Middle East, imperial order, conspiracy theories, conversion and crypto-religiosity. Among his more recent publications are Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East. A Comparative Approach (2014, coedited with M. Butter), World War I and the End of the Ottomans (2015, coedited with H.L. Kieser and K. Öktem) and Arabellion – From Rise to Fall (2017, coedited with Th. Demmelhuber and A. Paul). Available in Turkish is his 2017 Düzenin Şeyleri, Tanzimat’ın Kelimeleri: 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Reform Politikasının Karşılaştırmalı Bir Araştırması.